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Permalink Reply by Adam Hood on May 27, 2009 at 5:41am

Scott,

There are many solutions to the question you pose. First, SAS offers software specifically for dashboards (SAS BI Dashboard). I assume this is not what you are talking about. It sounds like you want to build a dashboard based on coding you do in SAS. If this is correct, we can help you build this out using only the tools you currently have licensed.

If this sounds like a possible solution, please feel free to contact me directly or at our website http://www.AFHood.com

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Permalink Reply by Scott Nicholson on May 27, 2009 at 10:13am

@Adam: Thanks for the reply but as of now we will be building the dash ourselves. We already have a bare-bones Java/Netezza dash and prefer to develop this in-house.

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Permalink Reply by Adam Hood on May 28, 2009 at 6:03am

In that case, building the dashboard can be simplistic or extremely complex depending on the types of data you are reporting. We have built dashboards by collecting the metrics in a single SAS produced report and pushing that to a webserver. Additionally, we have done trigger/event based dashboards that only show items of alarm with drill down for 'normal state' reporting. If your data is coming from Netezza, your build should be fairly straight-forward. If you are passing data with Java, it can become more complex very quickly.

As far as references, you might not find too much in the way of "dashboard" guides, but I would focus more on collecting and reporting your specific types of metrics in a meaningful way. There should be plenty of information regarding specific metrics and data in reports that can then be utilized within a dashboard.

Best of luck

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Permalink Reply by Daniel Kocis on May 30, 2009 at 9:31am

Read "Information Dashboard Design - The effective visual communication of data " by Stephen Few FIRST then

you better read up on SAS ODS.

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Permalink Reply by Ralph Winters on June 6, 2009 at 1:13pm

Robert Allison gives some good examples of constructing dashboards using SAS code and SAS Graph

http://robslink.com/SAS/dashboards/aaaindex.htm

-Ralph Winters

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Permalink Reply by Daniel Kocis on June 6, 2009 at 6:31pm

Please comment on the use of 'greplay' and a custom greplay template to lay out the graphs/kpi's
on one page creating html, png, gif VERSUS using ODS Layout creating a pdf.

You seem to get much better success with your approach. (Static data aside) While your code ID's excellent twists over the usual, your comments REALLY laid out several design factors excellently.

You /participated/won all those contests from 2005 on ?

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