14 Dashboard Design Principles Any Top Management Will Appreciate

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  Working for long in industry my skills are fairly tuned to the best in class, I always find communication of raw data to easy human understandable format especially to ever busy top management is a challenge, here are some solid ideas from my experience how to go about.

Dashboard design principles and best practices the rise of innovative, interactive, data-driven dashboard tools has made creating effective dashboards

In the digital age, there’s little need for a department of IT technicians, plus a graphic designer, to create a dazzling data dashboard. However, if you want to enjoy optimal success, gaining a firm grasp of logical judgment and strategic thinking is essential – especially regarding dashboard design principles.

Dashboard design should be the on top of your business reporting.

Here, it can get carried away by your creativity and designing colourful dashboard. Unfortunately, you must not play with it, There are dashboard design best practices you should follow to display your data in the best way, making it easy to analyse and actionable.

Business dashboard should be user-friendly and constitute a basic aid in the judgment-making process. To help journey to data-driven success,

I’ll go over these dashboard design guidelines to ensure you don’t miss out on any vital steps.

1. Consider your end goal

Like Strategic, Operational, Analytical, Tactical.

2. Don’t try to place all the information on the same page

You should never create dashboards that’s fits for all possible requirement and don’t chock up all the information into the same page.

3. Choose relevant KPIs

Your KPIs will help to shape the direction of your dashboards as these metrics will display visual representations of relevant insights based on specific areas of the business.

4. Provide context

Always try to provide maximum information, even if some of them seem obvious to you, your audience might find them perplexing. Name all the axes and add titles to all charts. Remember to provide comparison values.

5. Make it as easy as possible

That said, you should never lose sight of the purpose of designing a dashboard. You do it because you want to present data in a clear and approachable way that facilitates the decision-making process.

6. Choose your layout carefully

If your dashboard is visually reorganized, users will easily find the information they need. Improper layout forces users to think more before they grasp the point, and nobody likes to look for data in charts and numbers. I will make users smart when they are focused what to do with the data rather than thinking what or were to find data in dashboard.

7. Prioritize simplicity

Don’t waste space on useless decorations, like lot of pictures.

8. Be careful with colours – choose a few and stick to them

The modern dashboard is minimalist and clean. Flat design is really trendy.

Now, when it comes to colour, you can choose to stay true to your company identity or go for a totally different colour palette. The important thing here is to stay consistent and not use too many colours, an essential consideration when design a dashboard.

Manufacturing Production Dashboard displaying main manufacturing KPIs such as the production volume, active machines, sales revenue, returned items, etc.

9. Don’t go over the top with real-time data

Don’t overuse real-time data. Unless you’re tracking some live results, most dashboards don’t need to be updated continually.

10. Use the right type of chart

It’s important to understand what type of information you want to convey and choose a data visualization that is suited to the task. Line charts are great when it comes to displaying patterns of change across a continuum. They are compact, clear and precise. Line charts format is common and familiar to most people, so they can easily be analysed at a glance.

What kind of charts should be used in a dashboard design based on comparison, composition, relationship and distribution of data.

11. Be consistent with labelling and data formatting

In terms of functionality, the main aim of a data dashboard is gaining the ability to extract important insights at a swift glance. It’s critical to make sure that you're labelling and formatting is consistent across KPIs, tools, and metrics.

12. Use interactive elements

Drill-down is a smart interactive feature that allows the user to drill down into more comprehensive dashboard information related to a particular element, variable, or key performance indicator without overcrowding the overall design.

13. Double up your margins

You should always double the margins surrounding the main elements of your dashboard to ensure each is framed with a balanced area of white space, making the information easier to absorb.

14. Never stop evolving

Asking for feedback is essential. You’ll be able to improve the layout, functionality, look, feel, and balance of KPIs to ensure optimum value at all times.

So, if already have dashboard or thinking of improving it or creating a new one, put your newly-acquired dashboard principles into practice.

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Learn IT Security, starting from Kali Linux

I have cleared EC Ethical Hacking and looking forward to become CISM in few month, Have been in Linux/Unix environment since 1986, that's  whooping 34 years of expertise, I have started a new knowledge sharing session on IT security, 

You can learn about IT security the starting with Kali Linux. what you will get is years of experience practical IT expert security tips apart from learning the basics of IT Security. 

            Lesson 1 : Kali Linux

For doubts and other clarification please use the comment section.

I have planned for 24 lessons, Will try to add lessons very week

Use comment section for your suggestions

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Life is that way a solitary journey

Trudging along..Life is that way a solitary journey - you meet co-travellers on the way, some come with you for a small distance, some for a longer distance, some come for a much larger distance. Impact of some is very minimal (even if they travel for a much large distance), impact of some is ok, neither here nor there, but with some the impact is quite heavy( even if the togetherness is only for a small distance/time).

Life is like a train journey actually - you do not have control over your compartment, who your neighbours are, your end-station ( means your birth, family in which you are born, your death).

But you have control or choice of how you want to travel between your start and end of the journey - in between the 2 pages written out for you.

You can enjoy the scenery as the train passes through, you can go on top birth and enjoy some sleep, you can curl up and get lost in some interesting book, you can chit-chat and enjoy talks with the co-passengers, you can keep looking out for eating new, new things coming up, you can listen to some nice music, you can just wait for arguments cropping up between any travellers on any subject, enjoying the arguments or even taking sides, poking your nose where it is none of your business, you can incite people for no reason and enjoy the outcome. You can meditate and go into a state of bliss and get away from the Maya-World etc, etc.. There is no end to the possibilities and choices . You can even enjoy a balanced life of having everything in small doses ...

So life is not only destiny , there are choices also. The situation you are in as per Karma is your destiny, but how you take it -   is in your hand - that is you can react or respond positively to make the best of the situation

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DataCenter Build from Start to Finish

I was engaged in building couple of DC's, I tried my best to build the best keeping TIA 942 standard as based, all had two network path, two power supply from different sources, 2+1 redundant cooling system, fire rated the whole setup for 2 hours. used Novac as the fire extinguishing system , best in the world, the network had 128 gigabit back bone, more than you will need, state of the art Juniper networking equipment were used. BMS from leading brands.  

Click Images to See in Large Image 

1. My First Views on DataCenter Rooom

2. My First Views on DataCenter Rooom

3. My First Views on DataCenter Rooom

4. After DC room allocated, now with 2 hours rated firewall in place

5. Frame work internal room with 2 hours fire rated separation walls, for Network, DC operations and Server room

6. Stacks for fire proof, 2 hours fire rated panels

7. Precision Air Conditioners bottom flow, from Emerson

8. 2No 128 KVA USP from Emerson with 98% power-factor

9 Partion for Network Room

10. Nitrite Rubber for walls for insulation. saving power/expenses

11. False floor for effect bottom cooling for server racks, the floor is also covered with nitrite rubber

12. Precision Air Conditioners in 2+1 redudancy model, we will never run out of cooling

13. After the flooring is covered with removable tiles

14. Operational Precision Air Conditioner

15. 2 hours rate DC doors installed

16. Our door units for the precision air conditioner

17. High efficiency LED lights in operations

18. Our door units for the precision air conditioner

19. Power DB Panels in side DC, in redundancy one for each UPS, 100% reliable power supply backed by two 129 KVA ups and two 150 KVA Generators

20. Metal 2 Hours Fire Rated Main DC Door, opening controlled by Bio Metric devices

21. Getting the Server Racks Ready

22. Scroll Compressor Used for variable cooling capacity, it can vary from 1 ton to 10 tons, saving energy when possible and cooling when needed

23. Server Racks after assembled, ready for servers

24. Work in progress

25. BMS room, with fire control and detection, rat/snake repellents, power, network and DG monitoring centre

26. Satisfying view of the racks

27. Top of the Rack power supply with lockable cable connectors, for fail safe operation

28. Cable installation in progress

29. Fail over for AC unis for UPS Room

30. Raw power switch gear to handle EB and Generator Switching with out any human intervention,interlinked with BMS for operation efficiency

31. Power Supply for Network Racks

32. BMS Wall panel

33. Network Rack After the switches and cables in place

34. Used Novac Fire Suppressing System, expensive by environment friendly and equipment will clean even after the gas is discharged in case of fire.

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SAP on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server with XEN Virtualisation

We have SAP running on SUSE on XEN virtualization for 8 years without any glitch. We have to keep in mind the this was the early stages of virtualization we had to take great care as SAP was expensive tool and if the base virtualization fails, then my and organizations reputation was at stake.

To make things complicated the existing Microsoft Dynamic ERP was to be migrated to new SAP.  

  

The race was between VMware, KVM and XEN

How SUSE XEN won the race. First SAP was supporting SUSE platform and SUSE was supporting XEN, so the entire platform was being supported 

KVM lost because at the point of time we did not get any support next competitor was VMware, the client was very particular on costing and ease of expansion in the latter.

VMware proposal was, it provided limited VMs and over every VM there would be license cost and again a lock on a number of core and memory usage, this was a bottleneck if the organization was to expand, it will have to yield to VMware's demand, So the client asked for alternative and best alternative was XEN no limitation on VMs and Memory usage, and CPU core was also not a limitation. 

We did not stop at these findings, we wanted to test XEN failover and VMware failover, both did a prototype for testing.

VMware cluster failover and Vmotion was seen with system not available to users during the fail-over around 5 minutes. Which was a bit concerning to all of us. Otherwise the failover happened and the other system came up successfully.

SUSE XEN was also put to test on the same test hardware, the flavor was almost  pretty smooth we did not notice and noticeable non-availability to users. Only issues was we had do all in command line. 

Both were demonstrated to client, client decided on XEN based on cost, support and performance test results. 

One highlight of VMware had pretty user friendly Admin GUI interface, which SUSE XEN lacked, but the client was in the view that command line interface is better as people who are not experts will not touch the servers.

At that point of time VMware also was new to bare-metal implementation, were XEN score well over VMware. But today XEN is nowhere to be seen, VMware is seen as the king of virtualization and KVM also has better market after many companies have started supporting it development.

The SAP Architecture we used was Three Tire model, we have two physical servers and 4 VMs, for Production, Application, Database and Sandbox

I had a team of Basis and Abap developers and everyone worked in sync for this project. One of the major problems was backing up the VM, so to take snapshots , we had to allocate huge space in storage for the same, regular backup from DB2 database, DB2 was used as the client wanted to reduce costs further.

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SAP HANA 9 Pros and Cons

Advantages over SAP HANA

Let me start with benefits of, SAP HANA:

1. SAP HANA presents real-time evaluation then decision-making capability. It enables technology over extensive amounts of information while the commercial enterprise is running on. Thus, that gives immediate real-time insights.

2. The in-memory database technology makes records processing yet transactions very quick by smart thinking process from RAM. Therefore, facts perform lie immediately and rapidly processed beyond any know database.

3. SAP HANA lets in information stored and processed in columns and rows of the database. Also, many operations parallelly processed in SAP HANA namely opposed traditional RDBMS technology in the typical database for processsing some query. Thus, analogy is parallel processing technology will increase the speed of function multifold.

4. In traditional database, customers do use solely one on the transactional strategies (OLTP then OLAP) at a time. But, in SAP HANA’s in-memory database, customer is able to get retrieve data from more than a few databases for each transactional (OLTP) than analytical (OLAP) queries parallelly all at once.

5. You can acquire information besides various external facts sources that fit the source-agnostic capabilities concerning SAP HANA. Also, that makes the SAP HANA to function similar with distinct DBMS aged across the organization. Thus, enabling handy information integration. Without interrupting the continuous commercial enterprise operations, you execute perform records integration or total out of various capabilities or records sources within SAP HANA. You do additionally combine that with SAP Business Object BI solutions by using tools like SAP Lumira, Web Intelligence, SAP Crystal Reports, Design Studio, Dashboard designer, Universe Designer (IDT/UDT), BusinessObjects Explorer, Analysis Office, MS Excel. 

6. If the power fails for some reason the Persistent Data Repository will ensure that your business is recovered in case of a breakdown. By the real-time facts counterpart service, we can perform replicate the information between old SAP ERP and SAP HANA , not distributing existing operations of the enterprise suite.

7. For third-party software access, it may use features regarding SQL/MDX.

8. Using data modelling and devising tools, data models are performed virtual. It also makes the procedure over modeling and re-modeling altogether easy.

9. Admin Cockpit correctly manages and display various parameters of units of SAP HANA making life easy.

Disadvantages partial limitations of SAP HANA:

1. SAP HANA generally runs on SUSE Linux licensed hardware. It creates a problem because if the customer wants to run on any other hardware, the expenses concerning licensing are altogether high.

2. Limited hardware utility according to use SAP HANA a pricey investment.

3. SAP HANA does no longer supports all ERP products because of their different types of architecture. SAP HANA requires ERP users to change their architecture in imitation of redacting such HANA compatible.

4. The older version becomes out of date at all soon, this due to the face SPS releases and updates in the SAP HANA versions. And, it would be concerning by person handing ERP, each time and updating is time-consuming.

5. It has been noticed that SAP HANA server shut down at times of heavy data processing and calculation load.

6. Using hybrid solutions regarding HANA like walking that incompletely concerning the cloud integration , incompletely on-premise reasons a cluster about problems and doesn’t feature properly.

7. Usually, builders whosoever nonetheless proceed along their historic ways about assignment along with database technologies, are not capable of conformity with using SAP HANA to its complete potential. They solely utilize that as a quickly in-memory database, while even are deep other capabilities yet functionalities that SAP HANA provides.

8. SAP HANA appliance only certified in IA platform.

9. The relative new HANA Database is still addressing issues of that are related new products.

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10 Useful Tips From Experts In Internet of Things..

1. Make a Single point for adapting protocols and data models for gathering the information and managing the communications
2. Design new business applications through common interfaces
3. Creates common best-practices for it solutions, especially in defining communication and deployment processes
4. Scale connectivity separately from the rest of the organisation, allowing for the other application to keep running.
5. Adapt to existing workflows through state-of-the-art integration mechanisms
6. Unify Device Management capabilities, simplifying corporate management
7. Separate raw data from business data, dedicating a large data common for all the businesses
8. Add common IoT functionalities, like threshold detection, to all applications, implementing only once
9. Secures connectivity with devices in a separate layer, simplifying
10. Centralizes and reduces the knowledge and task force required to operate and maintain devices and connectivity issues

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