Tutorial Part I: Your First Dashboard

It's really easy to get started on Chartio. Basically, Chartio consists of dashboards, which function to organize the various charts you create from your data.

This tutorial will be the first part in a series teaching you how to create a rich real-time dashboard of your business data. To give you a sense of what a complete dashboard might look like, here's an example we've mocked up using data from stackoverflow.com.

Getting Started

When you first login to your dashboard, Chartio automatically analyzes your schema and provides you with a starter dashboard. The process looks like this.

Here, Chartio is looking through your tables for any DATETIME columns, finding that table's primary key and creating a set of basic time series graph in the background. You can easily delete or edit the charts created here.

Managing Your First Dashboard

You can choose to use the set of auto-generated charts or create new ones from scratch. But first, let's look at some of the basics of managing your dashboard.

Naming Your Dashboard

We recommend that you organize your dashboards so they represent coherent and self-contained reports. An example set of dashboards might include: Marketing, Sales, Operations and HR.

You can easily edit your dashboard's title by clicking on the settings tab in the upper right. This takes you to a page which allows you to edit and control your:

1. Datasources (this can be any number of databases)
2. Dashboards
3. Teammates (collaborators who have full access to create new dashboards and charts)

Then, simply click on the edit button on the dashboard of your choice.

Next Steps

Now that we've created and named our first dashboard, it's time to add some charts, which is the topic of the next short tutorial.