Skip to main content

Dashboards Basics

Introduction​

In Holistics, Dashboard is a collection of widgets that help you tell a story, or paint a big picture of your organization. This is where you save your ad-hoc data exploration into something permanent and deliver continuous values to your end users.

Create a dashboard​

How-to​

On Reporting page, you can create a new dashboard by clicking on the (+) next to a folder, or use the Create menu when you are browsing a folder.

Dashboard metadata​

You can find useful information about your dashboard by clicking on More Info, which includes:

  • Dashboard description
  • Created time & person
  • Last edited time & person
  • Frequent viewers - Top 5 users who view the dashboard most frequently in last 30 days (excluding public users)
  • Views - The number of dashboard views in last 30 days
  • Favorites

Admins can hide the metadata in case of security risks. Find the option in Organization Settings > General Settings.

Dashboard options​

If you click on the ... (More) symbol, you can see there are a few more things you can do with your dashboard:

  • Dashboard Preferences: This section contains all important configurations of your dashboard, including the ones we have mentioned above.
  • Embedded Analytics: Embed Holistics dashboard in your own application and make it available to your own customers. For more information, please refer to the Embedded Analytics documentation page.
  • Lock: If you are an Admin, you can lock important dashboards to prevent other Analysts from making accidental changes.
  • Duplicate: Quickly replicate your whole dashboard to a new one.
  • Move to: Move your dashboard to another folder. Note that:
    • If the dashboard is in the public workspace, it can only be moved within the public workspace.
    • If the dashboard is in your private workspace, it can be moved out to the public workspace.
  • Delete: Permanently remove your dashboard from the workspace. This action is irreversible.

Add dashboard widgets​

How-to​

After creating a dashboard, you can start adding widgets directly from the dashboard page, or save your data exploration results into the dashboard.

Go to Add -> Add New Report for a report widget or Add Text for a text widget in the dashboard view. Choose a dataset, and use the drag-and-drop UI to explore and create visualizations.

Widget types​

In Holistics's dashboard, there are two types of widgets: Report widget and Text widget.

Report widgets are used to visualize your data. Since Report widgets are backed by datasets, you can freely explore the underlying data:

On the other hand, Text widgets are used to provide additional instructions, context, warnings... directly in your dashboard. The widget supports Markdown, which should serve your most common formatting requirements.

For example, adding dashboard section header:

Customize widgets​

Resize Widget:

To resize a report widget, hover your cursor at any corner of the widget until it becomes open_in_full . Drag to expand or minimize the widget.

Customize Display Preferences:

You can tweak the display of the widgets for a cleaner look by clicking on the "..." on the top right corner of the widget and select Widget Preferences:

This is how the widgets look like when toggling between options:

Add Dashboard Filters​

To add filters to your dashboard:

  1. Click on Add filter icon on the top right corner. The Add Filter screen will appear.
  2. Enter the name of your filter, and choose from the five types of filters (Field, Date, Text, Number, True/False).
  3. Enter a default value for your filter if necessary.
  4. Toggle on the widgets that you want to control, and map the filter to a widget's fields.Notes:
    • You can only map the filter to fields of the same data type.
    • You can map the filter to any field available in the widget's dataset, not just the ones you used to create the visualization.
filters

Other operations with dashboard​

Export Dashboard​

You can either download your dashboard as a static PNG/PDF snapshot, or set a schedule to deliver the snapshot regularly to you. Please refer to the Data Export for more details about this feature.

Share Dashboard​

You can give users in your organization access to a dashboard, or share it with an external party with a shareable link. For more details, please refer to the Permission System and Shareable Links documentation pages.

Disable dashboard auto runs​

Holistics Dashboards, by default, automatically run its widgets when a user visits the Dashboard. Sometimes this is not a desirable behavior, since auto-run dashboards will:

  • cost the user unnecessary wait time
  • yield unnecessary load on your Data Warehouse
  • spawn unnecessary jobs that occupy your Job Workers

To disable this behavior:

  1. Go to Dashboard Preferences -> General
  2. Change the Dashboard Auto-run mode to Off and Save Changes.
  3. Refresh the dashboard for the change to take effect.

Video timestamps:

  • 0:00 - 0:10: How to disable Dashboard Auto-run in the Dashboard Preferences
  • 0:10 - 0:25: How a Dashboard with Disabled Auto-run works

With Disabled Auto-run, the Dashboard will not run any widget until the user makes an explicit run action such as:

  • Click Run Dashboard button at the bottom
  • Submit Filters
  • Click Refresh button on the right side of Dashboard Title
caution

Note that this setting will NOT be applied in

  • Shareable Links
  • Embed Links
  • or when the Dashboard URL has pre-applied filters.

Pin Dashboards to Homepage​

Pinning dashboards to the homepage allows admins to prominently display crucial dashboards for all users. This ensures broader visibility and easier access to key insights throughout your organization.

How to Pin a Dashboard to Homepage

  1. Navigate to the desired dashboard you want to pin.
  2. Locate the ellipsis button (...) on the dashboard view.
  3. Select the option "Pin Dashboard to Org Homepage."

Once pinned, the dashboard will be displayed on the Homepage for all users within your Organization who have the necessary permissions to view it.

For example, a pinned dashboard might only be shared with a user group in the Singapore region. Users from other regions who don't have access to that specific dashboard won't see it displayed on their Homepage.

Permissions and Visibility

  1. Pinning Permissions: Currently, only users with the "Admin" role can pin and unpin dashboards to the Homepage.

  2. Workspace Restrictions: Only dashboards located in Public Workspace can be pinned. If you want to pin Shared or Private dashboards, please move them to the Public Workspace.

  3. User Access: As we shared above, not all users are allowed to see the pinned dashboards — it depends on their access permission. If a pinned dashboard isn't shared with all users, the system will prompt you with the "Edit User Access" modal. This allows you to adjust user permissions if necessary.

  4. Pinned Dashboard Display Order: Recently pinned dashboards will show up first on the left side of the Homepage.

Using HTML​

You can use the HTML in Text widget to have Holistics render HTML instead of just showing a text value. Common use-cases can be:

  • Use HTML to style text with in-line CSS.
  • use HTML's img/video tag to embed videos and images in your dashboard.

Here is an example code of how to add an image/video into Holistics dashboard:

<img src="insert-link" width="50%" height="50%"/>;

<video width="290" height="130" controls autoplay> <controls> <source src="insert-link" type="video/mp4"> </video>

Using Markdown inside HTML​

Since our markdown engine follow the CommonMark convention if the content has markdown inside an HTML block you need to specify HTML (followed by start condition and end condition as described here) to ensure the content renders correctly.

Here is an example of text widget content that has markdown inside HTML:

<div style="width: 500px; height: 500px; background-color: pink">;

# Heading level 1
</div>
Let us know what you think about this document :)