Buggy dashboard

What is a Dashboard?

The etymology of 'dashboard' comes from the days of horse-drawn carriages. It referred to a barrier or wood or leather placed at the front of the carriage and which protected the driver from being spashed with mud or road debris thrown up by the horses' hooves. With the arrival of the horseless carriage, the dashboard protected vehicle occupants from the noise and heat of the engine and later became the logical location for gauges and indicators.

The Machine Age

As industrial machines and facilities became bigger, more complex, and mission-critical, the need to peer into the inner workings of the machine resulted in control panels of matching size and complexity - covering large walls or filling entire rooms. They also became an iconic fixture of many science fiction scenes - especially when they inevitably blow up.

The Interface Goes Soft

The arrival of industrial computers and digital displays in the 1980s allowed for the creation of "soft instrument panels" which collapsed roomfulls of chart and meter panels into hierarchical displays. The operator was presented system status overview dashboards where they could "drill down" to investigate anomalies. Such soft instrumentation was retrofitted into existing control rooms. These evolved into modern control rooms we see today, with wall-sized flat-panel displays and touch-screen operator consoles.

Process Instrumentation meets Business Intelligence

With such a long established practice of diagrammatic interfaces to information, one might ask why this approach is not typically employed in the broader realm of business intelligence. Lack of imagination could be part of the answer. But a lack of such capabilities within mainstream BI reporting tools is more likely to blame.

Why not Power BI?

Power BI is an awesome BI report authoring and disemmination platform. One feature that adds significantly to its awesomness is the ability to utilize custom data visualizations. And further, these visualizations can be created using existing web standards with HTML and SVG.

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Power Plant Status Monitoring

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