Streamlining Dashboard Migration across Tenants in Bold BI
Data is crucial to businesses of all sizes, and dashboards offer an effective way to visualize and analyze data to uncover valuable insights. However, it might be difficult to manage dashboards and data sources across various tenants or sites. Bold BI offers options to easily download and upload dashboards between different tenants or sites. In this article, we’ll look at how to move a dashboard from one tenant to another, which can speed up and ease this process.
Why it’s necessary
Exploring the significance of sharing dashboards across different tenants in your business operations enables you to understand how this process enhances data accessibility, collaboration, and decision-making. This includes:
Improved decision-making
By moving a dashboard across tenants, all teams can access the same dashboard and insights, which improves decision-making by using the download and upload feature.
Increased efficiency
Rather than creating a new dashboard from scratch for each tenant, using this feature, you can simply download an existing one and upload it to other tenants. This can significantly increase efficiency and productivity.
Improved visibility
This feature provides improved visibility in a dashboard by allowing users to view and analyze it across different tenants in a single place.
Customization
The download and upload feature enables users to customize the dashboard per their requirements and preferences, thereby enhancing the user experience. In addition, the dashboard can be used as a template to connect your data to visuals, thus eliminating the need to re-create the dashboard for each tenant or user.
Accessibility and Convenience
The download and upload feature allows users to access and use their dashboard offline from anywhere, and at any time. This is particularly beneficial for businesses that operate across different locations or time zones.
Use case for downloading and uploading a dashboard to an environment
Sales dashboard
A sales manager wants to share the dashboard with multiple teams that are located in different regions. The manager will create a dashboard and then share the BBIX file with the different teams in different regions. In each region, the regional head can configure the dashboard to connect to their regional data and share it with their team. In this way, the common dashboard can be shared across multiple regional managers who will be able to see the data of their region.
Through the sales performance dashboard, the sales managers visualize the overall sales performance over time, which they can customize to include the specific metrics that are most important to their tracking and achieve the following:
- Enhanced communication and collaboration in the sales department.
- Dashboard availability offline, enhancing operations without the internet.
- Ease of use and user adaptability.
Bold BI’s “download and upload” dashboards can also be a good way to improve the overall efficiency and effectiveness of your business intelligence (BI) processes. By making it easier to share and reuse dashboards, businesses can save time and resources, and ensure that everyone is using the same data and insights to make decisions.
How to download and upload dashboards across different tenants
Bold BI allows users to move their BI resources, such as dashboards, from one environment to another offline without needing an internet connection. Bold BI allows for online and offline migration of dashboards in a BBIX file, making sharing dashboards easier by avoiding manual configuration and setting up data sources and widgets.
Bold BI supports this by allowing you to download dashboards from the source site and upload them to the destination site.
How to download a dashboard
Steps
- Select a dashboard and click the actions to download, or you can do more than one by selecting the dashboard list or all dashboards on the same page at the checkbox in the header.
2. After clicking either of the download options, a dialog will show below where you can uncheck or proceed to include sensitive information by clicking Prepare Download.
3. The dashboard and its data sources will be ready for download. Depending on the data sources, it will take some time. The file preparation status can be tracked in the Offline Files tab on the Publish page, and the file can be downloaded once it is ready. You can navigate to the Offline Files tab with the following URL: https://<your-domain>/bi/publish/resources?tab=offline-files.
4. Click either individual, multiple or all dashboards using the checkbox.
For selecting all dashboards, click the Download All button. Downloading one dashboard gives a .bbix file, while multiple downloads yield a zip file with individual .bbix files for each dashboard.
5. Check the status of each dashboard. Also, refresh the page to have the latest updates on the status. For successful download, it will show as follows.
For failures, it will show as follows, and you can check the reason by clicking Know more.
If the cause of the failure is a permission issue, you can refer to here to solve it.
Now let’s look at the details for how to upload the downloaded the dashboard’s BBIX file.
How to upload your dashboard
Steps
- Click Upload Dashboards from the Bold BI page to access the interface for uploading your desired dashboards as shown.
2. Click Browse to locate the downloaded files either in BBIX or zip After selecting the required dashboard files to upload, wait for the upload process to complete. You will receive a message notification that the files were successfully uploaded. When you see this message; click Next to proceed to the next step.
3. After the successful upload of the required dashboard files, a page will be displayed to update the details of the uploaded dashboards. Update the category, name, and description of your dashboard.
The data sources in the uploaded dashboard will have a Pending or Completed state based on the configuration completed for that specific data source. Two data sources with different configuration states are shown:
To change the Pending state, you need to click the data source list, as shown.
A dialogue appears with two options for updating the data source’s configuration, as follows:
- Configure the data source.
- Map to an existing data source.
This will give you the option of linking the current data source to one that already exists in the same tenant, as shown below.
The data source will be validated after you update the details and click Done. The status of the data source configuration will be changed to Completed. The Dashboard List can be found on the left side of the upload dashboard window, with one dashboard in the Needs Attention and one in the Configuration Completed states, as shown.
You need to complete the data source configuration for the Need Attention dashboard. After you’ve completed configuring the data source, select the Upload option. After successfully completing the upload, a notification will show.
4. Go to the upload drafts page where the uploaded files are displayed.
5. Select multiple dashboards from the upload-drafts page and click Complete Upload. This will render the UI to upload the dashboards and display as follows.
You can find the uploaded dashboards present in the tenant along with other dashboards, if any.
Things to consider while downloading and uploading your dashboard
Consider the following when downloading and uploading a dashboard to a new environment:
- User access: Ensure you have the required permissions as a global administrator to download and upload dashboards between environments.
- Data security: Protect your data during dashboard downloads and uploads using secure methods like SFTP or cloud storage services like OneDrive or Google Drive.
- Dashboard compatibility: Ensure dashboard compatibility with the upload site, potentially requiring minor modifications.
- Data sources: If the dashboard’s data sources are not available where you’re uploading, update the dashboard’s data sources.
- Dashboard settings:Update dashboard settings when uploading to a new environment for proper functioning.
We believe this article will enable you to successfully migrate dashboards and data sources while maintaining data integrity and availability for a smooth data and business intelligence transition across systems.
Originally published at https://www.boldbi.com on November 27, 2023.
