Replicating Dashboards Across Different Database Environments in Bold BI Cloud
Creating consistent dashboards across various environments such as live, QA, and staging is a common requirement for analytics teams. Bold BI Cloud offers a straightforward approach to replicate dashboards from one environment to another, ensuring that teams can maintain uniformity in their analytics across different stages of development and deployment.
Steps to Replicate a Dashboard
To replicate a dashboard, such as creating a staging dashboard from an existing QA dashboard, follow these steps:
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Copy the Dashboard: Start by taking a copy of the existing QA dashboard, also select the “Copy the data source” option in the dialog.
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Change Connection Properties: After copying the dashboard, open the copied data source. Here, you will need to update the connection properties to point to the staging database server instead of the QA server by using the Edit connection option and save the data source by renaming the copied data source.
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Ensure Schema Compatibility: It is crucial to ensure that the schema of the staging database matches that of the QA database. If there is a schema mismatch, you will encounter issues when editing the connection.
By following these steps, you can efficiently create a new dashboard for your staging environment that mirrors the one used in QA, with minimal effort and without the need to recreate the dashboard from scratch.
We can also use the download and upload feature to replicate the dashboards instead of copying the dashboard. When uploading the downloaded dashboard file, the data source connection information needs to be updated to retrieve data from the staging database instead of the QA database in this specific use case scenario.
Additional Tips
- Backup Your Dashboards: Always keep backups of your dashboards before making any changes. This ensures that you can revert to a previous version if needed.
- Test the Replicated Dashboard: After replicating the dashboard and changing the database connections, thoroughly test the new dashboard to ensure that all functionalities are working as expected.
Conclusion
Replicating dashboards across different environments in Bold BI Cloud is a simple process that can save time and ensure consistency in your analytics reporting. By copying the dashboard and adjusting the data source connections, teams can quickly set up dashboards for various purposes without starting from scratch.
