Try to prototype an interactive dashboard for parts of the data available on SMELT.

Background

The teams handling the maintenance updates of SUSE products (Maintenance, Security, QAM and EMU) produce a lot of data but still makes limited usage of this data. This can be improved by having a dashboard where people could generate relevant reports by selecting specific periods, subsets of products, and more parameters.

Having more data summarized and readily accessible can help on taking more informed decisions, understand how and when the workload comes and certainly other aspects not even considered here.

The developers at the maintenance coordination team have been working on the second generation of an important tool used by the teams involved (SMELT), which evolved from a simple tool dealing with cached JSON data from IBS into a more professional tool using a real relational database and more robust frameworks to provide a consistent and up-to-date view of all the updates in-flight that the teams involved have to coordinate. This effort, besides being necessary, ended up opening some more opportunities by making the access to the data easier and faster. Recently there have been some contributions adding more statistics reports, but most of them using static set of parameters.

What is the plan?

• The project will start by researching the available frameworks, checking how they work together with Django and the front-end frameworks in use.
• After choosing one framework to play with, explore what are the available ways to make the data flow from the database on the backend into the visual representation on the frontend side.
• Implement a prototype on top of the above findings and make it available for further refinement

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