In the current data-driven scenario, data visualisation is something all data analyst have to court, and a dashboard, in this case, is an obvious protagonist. Dashboards allow real-time visualising and easy understanding of the key performance indicators in an organisation. Dashboards extract meaningful insights from data which is further used by organisations for decision-making.

How Is It Helping

An open-sourced dashboard is a platform available to the public for installation and customisation and is used for gaining meaningful and real-time insights from collected data. It can also be used for project-specific conditions. With the help of a dashboard, one can analyse and monitor the performance of data. It notifies and enables important information of data which helps an organisation to take future steps while making decisions.

How To Choose One

There are five types of dashboards:

1. Key Performance Indicator (KPI) Dashboard: This dashboard provides a compilation of contrasting visualisation for recording the important metrics in an organisation.
2. Q&A Dashboard: This dashboard is a collection of charts which provide answers to specific questions across a number of different topics.
3. Top-Down Dashboard: The Top-Down dashboard is mainly focused on a single topic and shows high level, aggregate KPIs as well as specific details that could provide more context or insight into the data.
4. Bottom-Up Dashboard: The Bottom-up dashboard provides minute details on a topic and then the user is allowed to view the details in context across the organisation.
5. One Big Chart Dashboard: This dataset is usually a map or a scatter plot which can be used to monitor or visually analyse specific issues and patterns across a large number of data points.

Popular-Open Sourced Dashboards

Here are some of the popular open-sourced dashboards a data analyst can use

Mozaïk

Mozaïk is a tool based on NodeJS/ React / D3 / stylus to easily craft beautiful dashboards. It supports multiple devices through an adaptive layout such as on a big screen in the open space or smartphones.

Dashing

Dashing is a Sinatra based framework which lets you build beautiful dashboards. With the help of this dashboard, one can perform various functions like fully create own with SCSS, HTML, and CoffeeScript, Drag & Drop interface for re-arranging the widgets, etc.

Grafana

Grafana is an open platform for metric analytics and data visualisation. It is most commonly used for visualising time series data for infrastructure and application analytics. It can also be used in other domains such as industrial sensors, home automation, etc.

Choosing the Perfect Dashboard

While choosing or building a dashboard, always make sure that you are using a high-quality dashboard which has the ability to solve business-critical queries and that is totally goal-oriented for your purpose. A high-quality dashboard includes various features like:

• Real-Time Information: Everything around the globe is moving fast and people have a little time to spare even for critical decision-making. Real-time dashboards provide precise and interactive information in real-time which can be immediately used by the organisations at the very moment for better decision-making.
• User-Friendly: A dashboard must not be complicated and must be designed in such a manner that the user can read and understand each point that the dashboard is revealing.
• Simple and Focused: A dashboard must be kept simple and focussed on one particular topic or ground so that it does not create chaos while churning the data. 
• Extendable: A good dashboard must contain a variety of integration such as data spreadsheets, SQL, among others.