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ARDI actually offers three ways of creating web dashboards – through Grafana, our Data Explorer and our Infographics engine.
If your needs are simple, we suggest going with Grafana. It’s a fantastic, open-source and easy-to-use dashboarding system that ARDI works with very well.
If you’d like visualisations that handle live data, or you want to create visualisations beyond the panels that Grafana supports, our Infographics are there to help.
And if you don’t want to go to the effort of creating and maintaining dashboards, our Data Explorer can create them for you.
Infographics
The Infographic engine focuses on flexibility. Infographics reports are written in Javascript and can take advantage of the impressive D3 and Observable libraries (among many others) to produce unique, responsive, animated and dynamic reports based on live data, history or both.
Javascript allows you to perform analytics and calculations, meaning it can do a lot more than simple line graphs – your limits are your imagination and your processing power.
Because ARDI has access to several different data sources (including sources of events as well as just time-series data), it’s often the only place where the data needed to perform complex analytics is available.
It also allows for consistency – rather than having several different dashboarding engines all needing to be accessed individually, ARDI can offer a single, unified dashboard experience.
The dashboards can use our query language to dynamically adjust to new assets being created or old assets being removed from ARDI, minimising the amount of maintenance you need to do when your sites change or you copy a dashboard between sites.
Because they are generated client-side, are designed for short-term (ie under 24-hour) reporting and are displayed as web-pages, they are generated very quickly and cause minimal server load.
They can also use our time travel functionality to allow a live display to move back to any point in recorded history, so you can replay events and incidents.
Finally – being entirely web-based – they can be easily embedded into other web-based products.
Data Explorer
While Infographics are complex to create, our Data Explorer is the opposite – your dashboards are dynamically created based on your ARDI assets
This not only allows you to look at all of the data for individual items, but you can drill downwards, inwards, outwards and side-to-side along your ARDI relationships to discover how the data you’re seeing fits in with the rest of your system.
It’s a great tool for engineers and trouble-shooters when trying to diagnose issues, since it builds a wide range of new visualisations when and where you need them, rather than needing someone to build them for you.