One of the main goals of CloudRadial is to streamline client-facing data to make it less "noisy" for them.
That means taking only the most important pieces of data and weaving them into a story that makes helps make a compelling business case for discussions down the line, such as in QBRs.
The dashboards help to accomplish this by simplifying down the technical data, like the one that's presented in the Infrastructure area, into more visually appealing gauges that show the same information.
Sometimes, partners will already have sets of data to display for clients that is beyond the scope of CloudRadial. This data might be hosted in various third-party apps and services such as:
- BrightGauge
- PowerBI
- Grafana
...and many more. These pieces of data can be brought into CloudRadial, so long as the information can be brought in via public-facing links.
This article aims to help set forth some best practices as to which pieces of data to display to best leverage any additional data within your CloudRadial platform.
Choosing Which Data to Show the Client
Think about your current processes and promises to your clients. Which data do they really need to see? Which data is cluttering up their understanding of what you deliver?
Switching your approach to focus more on key business benefits - such as efficiency, productivity, security, continuity, etc - can help make the decision easier.
It's ultimately up to you to decide what's worth keeping and what's not, but the rule of thumb is that if it's just data to look at without incurring any action, it's not worth keeping.
Data Display Best Practices
Once you've decided on the data you like to display, it'll be time to build it out within the dashboards.
Try to architect out the dashboards from the Partner > Content area. Because the dashboards created from this area can be pushed out to clients at scale, you'll have an easier time building a frame that you're comfortable with for everyone.
The challenge is that you'll likely have individualized links to dashboard data for each client. Client A may see their data with Link A, but Client B will see their data with Link B.
There are two ways to handle this - a simpler, more manual way (method 1), and a more scalable way (method 2).
Method 1: Simple Customization
Once you've created the "baseline" or "template" dashboards that you want from the global Partner > Content area, you can simply navigate to a specific client's Account > Dashboard area. Then, you can add a custom dashboard with any third party link like so:
- Click on + Add Dashboard at the top right
- Set the Title, Description, Display Order (optional), and the Icon
- A new dashboard will be created. Select the new dashboard from the top navbar
- Select Edit
- Find the HTML gauge under the Miscellaneous section
- (Optional) Add more gauges and drag/drop them to their preferred positions. You can also extend or shrink them by dragging their corners.
- Use the 3 blue-dot menu on the gauge and select Settings
- Select the </> Code View button
- Enter in HTML code to embed your information source. Below is a sample:
<p>
<iframe width="100%" height="750" src="YourEmbedLinkHere" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="true"></iframe>
</p> - Select the </> Code View button again to save the code.
- Select the Save button at the bottom to finalize the dashboard
Repeat this method for each client that needs a custom gauge, replacing only the YourEmbedLinkHere in each dashboard with the relevant link.
Method 2: Scalability with Tokens
Rather than creating each dashboard manually for each client, you can directly create a dashboard (or multiple dashboards) from the global Partner > Content area.
Directly within these globally distributed dashboards, you can insert a substitution token in the code to call a customer-specific link. Unlike the process above, that means having one centralized dashboard pushed out and relying on customer-specific tokens to tell CloudRadial which customer gets which link.
To set this up:
- Navigate to Partner > Content and create or add to an existing Dashboard content package
- Click on + Add at the top right
- Set the Title, Description, Display Order (optional), and the Icon
- Once set, click on the Layout tab to add gauges to the dashboard
- Select Edit
- Find the HTML gauge under the Miscellaneous section
- (Optional) Add more gauges and drag/drop them to their preferred positions. You can also extend or shrink them by dragging their corners.
- Use the 3 blue-dot menu on the gauge and select Settings
- Select the </> Code View button.
- Enter in HTML code to embed your information source. Below is a sample:
</p>
<iframe width="100%" height="750" src="@CustomDashboard" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="true"></iframe>
</p> - Select the </> Code View button again to save the code.
- Select the Save button at the bottom to finalize the dashboard.
We've now planted a substitution token into the dashboard. The token can be any name that you see fit - @CustomDashboard is merely a suggestion.
To finish the process, we'll need to do the following:
- Navigate to Partner > Clients
- Find the specific client(s) that you've pushed the dashboard out to
- Select the 3 blue-dot menu by their name and select View
- Select the Tokens tab
- Select +Add to create a new token
- Name the token @CustomDashboard (or whatever else you set) to match your HTML code from earlier
- Enter your 3rd-party dashboard link as the value
- Select Submit to finalize the process.
- Repeat this for any client that gets that dashboard with their relevant link.
While this process requires more steps, it ultimately makes for an easier time managing multiple dashboard visualizations for clients.
Using tokens within the dashboard helps to cut down on the labor of creating dashboards by keeping things subscribed to the content area, and therefore easier to manipulate and modify at scale.
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