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Create Dashboards and Visualize Live OData Services in Geckoboard
Use CData Connect Cloud to connect to live OData services and create dashboards for real-time monitoring and visualization in Geckoboard.
Geckoboard is a business intelligence tool that simplifies the visualization of key performance indicators (KPIs) by creating live dashboards. It allows teams to consolidate data from various sources - such as Salesforce, Snowflake, Google Analytics, and spreadsheets - and display it in a visually engaging and easy-to-understand format. Designed for simplicity and clarity, Geckoboard helps businesses monitor performance, track goals, and make data-driven decisions.
When used with CData Connect Cloud, you gain instant, cloud-to-cloud access to OData services from Geckoboard for dashboards, monitoring, visualizations, and more. This article explains how to connect to OData and create visualizations using OData services in Geckoboard.
About OData Data Integration
CData simplifies access and integration of live OData services data. Our customers leverage CData connectivity to:
- Access OData versions 2.0, 3.0, and 4.0, working with legacy services and the latest features and capabilities.
- Leverage advanced query options, including $filter, $select, and $expand, enhancing data retrieval from 3rd party tools.
- Use Server-side execution of aggregation and grouping to minimize data transfer and boost performance.
- Authenticate securely using a variety of schemes, including Azure AD, digest, negotiate, NTLM, OAuth, and more means secure authentication with every connection.
- Use SQL stored procedures to manage OData service entities - listing, creating, and removing associations between entities.
Customers use CData's solutions to regularly integrate their OData services with preferred tools, such as Power BI, MicroStrategy, or Tableau, and to replicate data from OData services to their databases or data warehouses.
Getting Started
CData Connect Cloud offers a seamless SQL Server, cloud-to-cloud interface for OData, enabling you to effortlessly create dashboards and visualizations using live OData services in Geckoboard. While building visualizations, Geckoboard requires SQL queries to retrieve the necessary data. With built-in optimized data processing, CData Connect Cloud pushes all supported SQL operations (such as filters and JOINs) directly to OData, utilizing server-side processing for fast and efficient data retrieval of OData services.
Configure OData connectivity for Geckoboard
Connectivity to OData from Geckoboard is made possible through CData Connect Cloud. To work with OData services from Geckoboard, we start by creating and configuring a OData connection.
- Log into Connect Cloud, click Connections and click Add Connection
- Select "OData" from the Add Connection panel
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Enter the necessary authentication properties to connect to OData.
The User and Password properties, under the Authentication section, must be set to valid OData user credentials. In addition, specify a URL to a valid OData server organization root or OData services file.
- Click Create & Test
- Navigate to the Permissions tab in the Add OData Connection page and update the User-based permissions
Add a Personal Access Token
If you are connecting from a service, application, platform, or framework that does not support OAuth authentication, you can create a Personal Access Token (PAT) to use for authentication. Best practices would dictate that you create a separate PAT for each service, to maintain granularity of access.
- Click on your username at the top right of the Connect Cloud app and click User Profile
- On the User Profile page, scroll down to the Personal Access Tokens section and click Create PAT
- Give your PAT a name and click Create
- The personal access token is only visible at creation, so be sure to copy it and store it securely for future use
With the connection configured, you are ready to connect to OData services from Geckoboard.
Connect live OData data in Geckoboard
Follow these steps to establish a connection from Geckoboard to the CData Connect Cloud Virtual SQL Server API.
- Log into Geckoboard
- Add a custom dashboard name and click Add widget
- Search for "Databases" in the Connect your data search bar
- Select SQL Server as the Database type
- Fill in the connection details:
- Connection name: enter a name for the connection to CData Connect Cloud
- Host: enter the Virtual SQL Server endpoint: tds.cdata.com
- Port: : enter 14333
- Database name: enter the Connection Name of the CData Connect Cloud data source you want to connect to (for example, OData1)
- Username: enter your CData Connect Cloud username. This is displayed in the top-right corner of the CData Connect Cloud interface. For example, test@cdata.com
- Password: enter the PAT you generated on the Settings page
- Click Connect
After successfully configuring your connection, you can query and visualize your OData services.
Visualize live OData services in Geckoboard
To visualize live OData services in Geckoboard, follow these steps:
- Write an SQL query to select the specific OData services needed for visualization in Paste your SQL query compiler screen
- Choose the visualization type (Line Chart, Bar Chart, or Column Chart) that best suits your business requirements
- The selected chart will be displayed on Geckoboard
- Click the menu (three dots in the top-right corner of the graph) and select Edit to modify the SQL query or set a refresh interval for the chart
Depending on your use case, you can also generate the desired SQL query using the AI Generator or Query Builder features of CData Connect Cloud
Live access to OData data from cloud applications
At this stage, you have established a direct, cloud-to-cloud connection to live OData services in Geckoboard. This enables you to create dashboards to monitor and visualize your data seamlessly.
For more details on accessing live data from over 100 SaaS, Big Data, and NoSQL sources through cloud applications like Geckoboard, visit our Connect Cloud page.
