Making a dashboard with Chrom SST results

Perhaps the most compelling reason to have Chrom SST is to have a dashboard that allows you to track performance across instruments over time, be alerted to any failures requiring action or even to allow preventative maintenance based on trends before an event happens.

However, the exact requirements for a dashboard can vary greatly among individuals and companies. Everyone has a slightly different vision of what it should display and how it should appear. This is why many opt for business intelligence (BI) applications like Spotfire or PowerBI to build their dashboards. Indeed, this is the approach we have taken with Chrom SST – Mgears can write the Chrom SST results to a user-supplied database, and then tools like Spotfire can be used to connect to that, allowing users to create whichever visualizations they require. In other words, we focus on what we do best – data processing and analysis – and we integrate with those who excel at dashboarding and visualization.

Connecting to a database is easily achieved using Mgears. You can write to most flavors of SQL databases, using a schema we have designed or any schema you require. As this is achieved via the script engine it can be customized as needed.

The SQL plugin 

Mnova has a SQL plugin that allows connection to most used database engines such as SQLite, Oracle, Postgres, and MySQL. The SQL plugin acts as a bridge between Mgears and the database, facilitating the writing of results to your chosen database. BI tools like Spotfire readily connect to these standard database sources, so, once data is being written to the DB, connecting it to the data source is straightforward.  

Mestrelab Research: Mnova SQL plugin

Using an output script 

To write results to a database, we leverage Mgears’ capability to specify an output script that runs on every sample processed by the system. This allows us to tailor the behaviour of the database write to our exact needs.

Mestrelab Research: Output script

The output tab allows an output script to be run on every sample processed – this is set up to call the script that writes to the database. 

The suggested schema 

Relational databases have a ‘schema’ – the tables and columns where data is stored within the database. We have designed a schema that allows the results of SST to be easily stored, along with an output script that writes the results to that specific schema. This provides an out of the box solution is available for writing SST results to a database.  

If you prefer to use a different schema, that is also possible. You can design your own schema and adapt the output script accordingly. You can of course use our schema as a template to refine the output to your needs.

Mestrelab Research: The schema used in the out of box solution.

Creating a dashboard 

BI tools like Spotfire readily connect to standard database sources, so once data is being written to such a DB, connecting it to the data source is straightforward. The details are beyond the scope of this document, but many online tutorials show how to use this inbuilt functionality present in most BI tools. Below is an example of a dashboard created by a customer using Chrom SST and writing results to such a database.  

Users are free to create one or more dashboards, perhaps a high-level one to show overall status, and more detailed ones for each instrument showing history. Control charts of parameters like peak width over time are very useful in this regard as they allow preventative steps to be taken before specs fail.  The limit is only your imagination (and the BI toll you choose!). 

Mestrelab Research: View in Spotfire showing overall status and control chart, created in Spotfire from data in the SST DB.