Johannesburg, 30 Nov 2021
Access to real time data gives businesses a powerful competitive edge, but for many organisationsa project to build real-time dashboards raises concerns of significant investment and lengthy timelines.
This need not be the case, says Kris Jenkins, a Developer Advocate for Confluent. “Now, developers can dash out a simple dashboard in their lunch hour to test the viability of a concept. They don’t have to turn it into a three-sprint project.”
Jenkins says most organisations want to have immediacy in their data, but are reluctant to invest the time and effort they believe is necessary to do so.
“You could take the recipe and say these are five KPIs we think would be useful for people to see; let’s put a dashboard together and see if it offers the value we thought it could. You can find out very quickly whether it’s worth investing in,” he says.
Jenkins, who is also a veteran startup contractor and former CTO & Co-Founder of a gold trading business, says real-time data is a valuable and motivating business tool.
“When the gold trading business was a startup, I built a dashboard to show the day’s sales figures, and seeing the numbers roll in made it constantly real. It comes back to agile feedback loops, getting updates every few seconds on how healthy this system is, whether it is applied to sales, databases, health, network monitoring, engagement on a website, or any other figures that are interesting to your organisation.”
“There’s generally a feeling that to do this, you need database skills, web service skills, and front-end skills. However, realistically you don’t need these or much time investment.”
Jenkins will demonstrate how to build a real-time dashboard in just 30 minutes, during a webinar to be hosted by Confluent, in partnership with ITWeb on 1 December. In this live-coding session, he will harness Apache Kafka to create the skeleton of a real-time dashboard from scratch using three languages - KSQL, Python and JavaScript.
The webinar will also demonstrate the benefits of Confluent Cloud, the industry's only cloud-native service for data in motion built around Apache Kafka.
For more information, and to register for this event, go to https://www.itweb.co.za/webinar/dashing-off-a-dashboard-with-apache-kafka/
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