BI4Freshworks

Inspiration

Collaborating with DevOps and interacting with them for creating dashboards, an idea came into my mind that APIs are sources of data. If we can turn the data generated from API into relational data then we can use BI tools to create the dashboards which will be more powerful than the custom ones.

What it does

BI tools act as a front end to complement Freshworks dashboards. You can visualize Freshworks data in beautiful charts and data grids. You can filter data using controls available in BI tools. You can interact with the BI tool just like Freshworks front end no need to trigger an application to dump data. You get updates sitting within the BI tool.

Everything you need in one dashboard. Like you can have data from multiple Freshworks instances in one place. If the analysis dataset is small but highly volatile and you need updates in near real-time then BI4Freshworks is for you because you don't have to wait for the regular intervals to see the results.

BI4Freshworks can scale to support a big user base because we serve data in real-time and we are not piling up the data. Another dimension we can scale in is the API set we cover at little cost.

BI4Freshworks is a step towards a single source of truth because sometimes developers are logging the same information in multiple systems like two Freshworks instances. With BI4Freshworks there is no need to do that.

How we built it

A routine (prototype) to convert JSON to relational data. The front end is built in PHP using Codeigniter. The backend is in MariaDB.

Challenges we ran into

JSON to relational conversion is challenging however I managed to come up with an implementation that allows cherry-picking JSON nodes and the routine converts Json paths to relational data with some limitations.