Performance Dashboards: Measuring, Monitoring, and Managing Your Business, 2nd Edition

CHAPTER 13

How to Architect a Performance Dashboard

There are numerous ways to architect a performance dashboard, and the choices dictate what your performance dashboard can and cannot do. Whether you build or buy a performance dashboard, you need to understand the implications of the system’s underlying architecture.

Architecture determines how fast dashboards resolve queries and respond to user inputs and how many users can access the system at once without degrading performance. It determines how easily users can navigate from summary to detail levels of dimensional information and what objects and data they are allowed to see. It also determines how easy the dashboard is to install, configure, and administer as users and requirements change over time.

This chapter focuses on a few key architectural issues that you need to consider when deploying a performance dashboard. Specifically, it examines the performance implications of various user interface technologies and illustrates a half-dozen data architectures that are most commonly used to support dashboard implementations and products.

Display Architectures

Evolution

The architecture of performance dashboards have followed the trajectory of software architectures in general, from mainframe computing to client/server computing to Web-based architectures. Today, rich Internet applications (RIAs) are gaining in popularity because they support dazzling multimedia and visual effects, boosting the appeal and usability of performance ...