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Show HN: Castor, a live dashboard for your projects

getcastor.com

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Re: Show HN: Castor, a live dashboard for your projects

#51

Post by nobrains »

weego wrote: post #16

One of the things that really hit home at my last job and that I see missing from a lot of these dashboards is comparative context. So I walk in in the morning and we have a dashboard for vists and signups / payments and it shows lots of visits and no payments. Is that normal? Is that expected or concerning? Without showing what it was yesterday at the same time or on the same day last week, or weekly/monthly avg how…

The best dashboards are those that have actionable indicators. Graphs or indicators that, if beyond a certain range, will make you act to fix something.

Re: Show HN: Castor, a live dashboard for your projects

#52

Post by doublerebel »

dd112 wrote: post #9

This looks nice! Can anyone recommend an opensource/self-hosted alternative? Would really like to set something like this up in the office but would prefer to host it on my internal network. Plus I like to tinker with things :)

NodeJS push streams, lightweight to run, includes notifications:

https://github.com/nextorigin/godot2-dash

Re: Show HN: Castor, a live dashboard for your projects

#53

Post by dotBen »

weego wrote: post #47
dotBen wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you are looking for is a BI (business intelligence) tool. Those typically include dashboard but also look at trends - both automatically and programmatically via your own scripting. Looker is probably my favorite currently but it depends on your needs really.

I know what you're saying, I'm often bad at meandering past the point I'm thinking of with a non-focused example. I guess in a nutshell I feel like these dashboard products, while well meaning and often very well crafted are just throwing things at your eye sockets. Showing data because you have data is not a solution in of itself.

I dunno, there's probably room for all of them. There's lots of uses for dashboards that are not BI-driven - Castor even suggested their service could be used for conference room information etc.

I think the problem is dashboards on their own are pretty low value - ie $40/y for Castor. But that doesn't create a very interesting or particularly sustainable business.

Re: Show HN: Castor, a live dashboard for your projects

#54

Post by johndoe4589 »

zuzun wrote: post #30
johndoe4589 wrote: post #6

As an aside, I noticed the above-the-fold design is very similar to [ElementFE]( http://element.eleme.io/#/en-US ). What's up with that? Did this particular design with the slanted line originate somewhere else or are they the same people perhaps?

It creates a smooth visual flow. Straight horizontal lines chop your website into blocks. This, on the other hand, separates your content without breaking it apart. Your link is a good example because it also has these overlapping graphics that "hang" into the next section. Stripe [1] makes heavy use of this. [1] https://stripe.com/

Wow.. that is a much more striking use of the "slanted" layout. Superb.. it has a little bit of "materialize" feel to it but without the cold / harsh aspect of material (imho). Or maybe Material isn't done very well in most sites / apps I've used (often times they tend to have a ton of space that's not really "white space", just badly designed empty space.. Google loves to do this by forcing mobile app layouts into a desktop site).

Also this is a great use of animations. The page is fairly static, and animations are used in interactions (mouseover mostly).

Adding this site to my inspiration bookmarks :)

Re: Show HN: Castor, a live dashboard for your projects

#56

Post by tw04 »

curun1r wrote: post #49
weego wrote: post #16

One of the things that really hit home at my last job and that I see missing from a lot of these dashboards is comparative context. So I walk in in the morning and we have a dashboard for vists and signups / payments and it shows lots of visits and no payments. Is that normal? Is that expected or concerning? Without showing what it was yesterday at the same time or on the same day last week, or weekly/monthly avg how…

It's hard to include that information in a meaningful way on a dashboard. It's much easier to alert on that when a metric deviates by a certain percentage. We used a service called StatHat that did this automatically, but it could easily be written on top of an in-house data source like Influx or Prometheus. Dashboards are about visualizing how your application works over time, not whether your application is failing…

>It's hard to include that information in a meaningful way on a dashboard.

How is it hard to show a comparison of current state vs. average state? That's literally about as simple as it gets, and something I would expect as basic functionality out of any dashboard product I was using.

Re: Show HN: Castor, a live dashboard for your projects

#57

Post by jonasmaturana »

nrjames wrote: post #21
dyladan wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd use a raspberry pi set up as a kiosk. If you google 'raspberry pi kiosk mode' there should be a fair handful of simple tutorials.

Awesome - thanks for the advice!

Hi nrjames, I'm working on a small service that will let you do that using a Raspberry Pi 3 and about 10 minutes of your time. Would you be interested in super early access? It would be awesome to get some feedback as I'm trying to solve that exact problem: Get a dashboard on a HD tv in an easy way.

Re: Show HN: Castor, a live dashboard for your projects

#58

Post by morisy »

reacharavindh wrote: post #15
andruby wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well there's Dashing from Shopify which has been around since 2012. We use it at the office and are happy with it. https://github.com/Shopify/dashing

Apparently dashing is not being maintained anymore. Check its homepage. http://dashing.io

Yeah, we use Dashing, and very stable/nice/easy to extend. Sad that it's no longer maintained, but pretty good nonetheless.

Re: Show HN: Castor, a live dashboard for your projects

#59

Post by bilalel »

dd112 wrote: post #9

This looks nice! Can anyone recommend an opensource/self-hosted alternative? Would really like to set something like this up in the office but would prefer to host it on my internal network. Plus I like to tinker with things :)

Cyclotron [a], and here is a link to the discusion on HN about it [b] :

[a] http://www.cyclotron.io/ [b] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13062998

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