Several customers use Power BI to show a dashboard from Smap data. They extract the data by periodically calling Smap’s data API. This works well, although it can add a significant CPU load to the Smap servers where there is a lot of data and Power BI updates frequently.

I thought I would have a go at using AWS Quicksight to do the same thing. This proved to be straightforward and within a few hours, including the learning curve, I had a working dashboard. which included the donut chart shown below.

Cool things about Quicksight

• It is serverless so It can scale automatically from small implementations to very large. This scaling also applies to cost which should be small for small usage and large for heavy usage.
• Dashboards can be embedded into your website
• You are not restricted to just accessing Smap data you can include text documents, other databases, use artificial intelligence services to gain insights into the data etc.
• Apps are available for iOS and Android to show the data.
• It now supports maps which seems to be a relatively recent addition
• When accessing a Smap server, which is also on AWS, the request does not need to go across the Internet
• A built in data engine called “SPICE” which stands for Super-fast, Parallel, In-memory Calculation Engine offloads the work from the Smap server for your data crunching.
• It is pretty easy to use.

How to get Started

• Create an account on AWS
• Ask Smap to provide a logon to access your data on the server. Specify to Smap the surveys you need to access as well as any table joins you want. We will set up secure read only access for you to just your data.
• Start creating dashboards.
• Embed the dashboards into your own applications

Summary

If you are already a PowerBI, Tableau or other BI user then you can use that tool to add a dashboard to visualise Smap data. Probably using the API but we can also consider a solution with a direct JDBC data connections.

If you are not currently using a BI dashboard then you can consider using AWS Quicksight.