Insights – Open-Source Self-Hosted Business Intelligence Platform | Hacker News Reader

Insights – Open-Source Self-Hosted Business Intelligence Platform

github.com

91 pointsmariusandra14 comments

I totally do not get the negative comments.

Having seen a fair share of BI tools (I created and maintain an "awesome" list at [1] which I created for the sole purpose of getting an overview of what's out there) and assessing the stage you're at developing solo, you're getting quite some important UI basics very right imo.

The "Next Steps" give a great impression of what's possible and how to navigate the app.

From an E-Commerce viewpoint, most people want to flexibly play around with Products, Orders and Order Line Items and ratios between the three. Configuring this by hand in something like Google Datastudio etc. is cumbersome, even or more so in Looker (if broken out into separate Views, one needs to needs to create Merged Results Looks; if not the different cardinality objects are always connected). I feel like Insights is handling this really well. If you would add support for calculated fields, you'd offer a compelling E-Commerce controlling solution.

One issue I noticed though is that your nesting seems to be unlimited. I could open an infinite "table" tree if I start from the order_lines or product view --> order_lines --> order --> order_lines --> product --> seller --> orders/ products... ad infinitum.

You want to make sure that this drilldown into FK relationships does not lead to loops. Also I think some visual support where in the nest tree one is at (orders --> order_lines --> product --> sellers) would be great, otherwise it's quite easy to get lost.

Other than that honestly congrats on doing a lot of things right in terms of data viz, responsiveness, sharing capabilities. Really like your work!

[1]: https://github.com/thenaturalist/awesome-business-intelligen...

Hey, thank you for your kind words!

I've been putting a lot of effort into the UI/UX lately and it's great to see it paying off... even though there is still so so much to improve.

We actually already have support for calculated fields! Just edit a "subset" and you can add as many custom fields as you would like. [1]

Thanks again for the feedback! :)

[1] https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/53387/74677547-e8d...

Nice, well done! I'm using Metabase at the moment, which I quite like, except for a few little annoyances. What was your motivation for writing this, and where do you see insights differ from the current main players like metabase, superset and redash?

Feature wise, in case you are interested, for these tools it is important to me to be able to create the graphs/dashboards in an automated way, e.g. via an api. Import/export would also be good. Also: openid support, ldap would be nice to have too, but openid would suffice.

Hey, thanks!

Regarding Metabase, Insights has full blown first class support for joins... so we don't have to write blog posts like this [1]. My research shows Metabase works great with normalised tables (like a CSV file? normalised NoSQL table, etc)... but falls short when you need to visualise relations between tables. You can look at for example all your orders, think "I wonder what's the highest grossing country" and have the results at your fingertips.

Regarding Redash, which seems to be a nice SQL editor, in Insights you don't need to know any SQL to get answers. Thus "business stakeholders" can get dirty with the data with minimal training.

Regarding Superset, I'm unfortunately not familiar with its latest features. Please somebody reply with an overview! :) Last time I checked it (many years ago), it was pretty complicated to get it installed (some python issues?) and I'm not sure if you could explore data without knowing SQL. Insights in comparison is super easy to install (npm install -g insights) and get going with.

[1]: https://www.metabase.com/blog/Joins/

I work on Metabase and wanted to say congrats on putting all this together. Excited to see more open source options for BI.

Just as a point of fact - that blog post you linked to is 3.5 years old at this point.

Even at that time we had implicit joins (for things like top grossing countries if you had an FK in your transactions back to a table w/ the country field).

We've had joins in our notebook mode for a while now (https://www.metabase.com/docs/latest/users-guide/custom-ques...)

Ah, my apologies! Thanks for clearing this up!

And to add, regarding the feature requests:

- OpenID support is definitely on the near term horizon. I actually need Google Oauth support for myself... and adding a few other providers, including OpenID will be part of that development. Ldap, I'm not sure... perhaps one day, but having that won't scratch my own itch and we're still in the early days.

- Insights has a full API for communication that is used by the frontend, including for creating/saving charts and soon for dashboards. Userless API access is also one of the next things in the list... and with that you can create as many charts/dashboards as you would like. I personally already use the insights API in my work's backend for autogenerated graphs. The backend Rails app talks to Insights and passes the data returned to the "insights-charts" package, which embeds a React graph our admin backend. The only thing needed is to copy the query (button in the top right) and modify it as needed before making the request for chart data.

- Import/export would indeed be good to have!

insights is MIT-licensed and built on JS/TypeScript with a node backend. That's really appealing as a user since it means there's no need to delve into another programming language or huddle with the lawyers to figure out our legal obligations if we make changes. Contrast with the alternatives:

- Metabase is AGPL and built on clojure, making it a hard pass on both counts

- redash and superset have friendlier licenses (bsd-2 and apache-2 respectively) but are built with Python.

Hi, that's a good point! This was also not an accident.

Insights started life as a Rails app, but I wanted the portability that being a JS app provided, so I rewrote it. Back then I just wanted it to eventually get it running in Electron.

Now it's an app running FeathersJS [1] and CreateReactApp [2] under the hood.

[1]: https://feathersjs.com/

[2]: https://create-react-app.dev/

The title should be: "Insights is a tool to visually explore a PostgreSQL database"

IMO, your demo site could be improved by having some widgets created in advance.

Already on my nope not even gonna try it list.

The demo page does that annoying crap where it tries to prevent you from navigating to your prior site.

I thought that trend peaked in like 2001.

I can assure you, that's a bug and not an intended feature.

Thank you for your feedback.

In that case I apologize for the prior tone.

I will check it out now that you have stated it is a bug.

Thanks!

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