Redash is an open-source data collaboration platform that enables you to connect to any data source, visualize data and share it.
Here at Easy Taxi, we use it mainly to enable our Regionals BIs to connect to their BigQuery projects so that they can create dashboards facilitating the decision-making process for business units.
This tutorial is to help beginners who need to create dashboards on the platform.
How to create a dashboard
Dashboard is composed of widgets, which can be any visualization created from the query source page. The dashboard is created by clicking on the “New Dashboard” button on the homepage, assigning it a name and then clicking on the “save” button.
You can also, at any time, create a dashboard by clicking on the dropdown menu on the fixed navbar.
After this, we have only an empty page with the dashboard name. The next steps will explain how to create the widgets to fill the dashboard.
Create query
Redash comes with an interface to write and run queries on the platform. At the time of writing, the native UI is still a bit primitive. BigQuery’s Web UI is the best option to compose queries.
We recommend you compose queries in BigQuery Web UI and then save them in Redash.
Just click on the “New Query” button, type a name to your query (otherwise it will be considered a draft), copy and paste the query inside of the text area and click on the “save” button.
Optionally you can write a description for the query that will be shown right before the query title in the dashboards.
Make sure that you chose the right datasource on the sidebar.
You can also, at any time, create a query by clicking on the dropdown menu on the fixed navbar.
Create visualizations for the query
All saved queries by default have a ‘Table’ visualization created. You can create more visualizations after the query runs for the first time.
The options are:
- Chart
- Cohort
- Counter
- Map
And more and more visualizations are coming.
Click on the “+ New Visualization” button, select Visualization type, set a name and options for the visualization, and then click “save”.
Certain visualizations need a specific query output structure.
Use the Redash demo instance to see what you can achieve, try out all the things, and learn how to prepare the query to bring, for example, Cohorts visualizations to dashboards. It’s very cool.
Attach visualizations to dashboard
Finally, after creating queries and visualizations for them, we can add widgets to our dashboards. Click on the “+” button and the screen below will be showed.
Type the name of the query to see the visualizations available for the query.
Choose the visualization, optionally set the widget’s size (Regular or Double) and click the “Add to Dashboard” button.
That’s it! Now we have a dashboard with a widget. This is a very basic example.
Had we written a query that actually queries data on the data source we could click on the update button (to the right of dashboard name) and the dashboard would be auto-refreshed to bring new data in the scheduled time previously set on the query page.
December 10, 2015
By Wesley Batistas, BI Analyst
