In winter months, many cities are struck with extreme snowstorm events that can leave people stranded for hours or even days. Operations managers need to monitor snow event responses and determine which streets are not getting attention.
Using Operations Dashboard for ArcGIS let’s create a dashboard that can be used to see the condition of the streets, status of the snow removal operations, and snow-related complaints that have been reported. We’ve used GeoEvent Server to bring the following data feeds into ArcGIS Online:
Simply put, a dashboard is an item in ArcGIS Online (and soon ArcGIS Enterprise). Using Operations Dashboard, you can configure a simple or advanced web app to visualize your data for at-a-glance decision making. See our documentation page for more details.
“A dashboard is a view of geographic information that helps you monitor events or activities. Dashboards are designed to display multiple visualizations that work together on a single screen. They offer a comprehensive and engaging view of your data, to provide key insights for at-a-glance decision making.”
Often, the best first step in designing a dashboard is to come up with a list of questions that the end user(s) would like it to answer at-a-glance. The following questions are applicable to our scenario.
Next, determine how the dashboard will be viewed. Will it be unattended (e.g., on a wall-mounted screen) or interactive (e.g., used on a desktop or tablet)? If unattended, then all information should be accessible without clicking anything. If interactive, we can take advantage of stacking elements and interactive filtering. OK, let’s build an interactive dashboard.
When signed into your ArcGIS Online organization, on the Content page you can create a dashboard from the Create button. You can also click the App Launcher next to your user name in the header to open the home page of Operations Dashboard.
For this exercise, we’ll create it directly from a webmap.
Note: Non-organizational public accounts and Level 1 accounts do not support creating dashboards. You need to be a Level 2 account in your organization.
Consider the theme you'd like to use (dark or light) and the colors of your dashboard. The symbology and basemap in this webmap were specifically chosen to support a light themed Dashboard. If you would like to customize the map, do a Save As to create a copy. Otherwise continue to the next step.
Tip: Your basemap, symbology and the rest of the dashboard elements should complement each other. Bright colors should be used to draw the viewer’s eyes to important things, such as the vehicles and complaints.
Now that you are editing your dashboard, let's add some elements to it. Elements include data visualizations such as maps, lists, charts, gauges, and indicators. It is important that you carefully consider which elements best display the information you want.
In the Designing Your Dashboard section above, we said that we’d like to show how many complaints have been reported. Let’s do this with an Indicator.
Let’s add some text to the number displayed. Click the Indicator tab.
In the Middle Text input, add the text “ Complaints” making the full text read “{value} Complaints”
Tip: It is a best practice to give each element a name. Go to the General tab and update the Name property. Names are used later when you wire up actions. I'll be skipping this step in this post for simplicity.
Let’s add a bar chart showing the number of complaints per type. The Serial Chart is used to create bar charts, line charts, area charts, and combinations of these.
Tip: There are ways to create categories with data in other formats. Read the help page for more details.
We can also show a List of the complaints.
Now that we have four elements on the dashboard, let’s move them around. Hovering over an element, move your mouse over the blue box in the upper left of the element. In the expanded menu is a drag button. Click and hold this button to move it.
While dragging the element, icons appear at locations where you can dock the element. For more details, read this overview.
Reposition the elements to resemble the following.
If you prefer, you can change the theme to Dark Theme using the … button in the navigation panel.
Tip: If you'd like to edit your basemap after changing themes, open your webmap using the Home button in the upper left of the navigation panel and edit it. Consider using one of Esri's excellent vector basemaps.
Here is an example of the dashboard in dark theme using a another version of the webmap, colored to compliment the dark colors of the dashboard.
You can add map tools, such as zoom controls and a legend, by expanding the blue menu in the upper left of the map element and clicking the Configure button. Turn On the following map tools: Default Extent and Bookmarks and Zoom In/Out.
Let's continue adding some visual elements to the dashboard.
A question that users of this dashboard may have is the status of the snow removal operations. We can visualize this with a Pie Chart.
Note: At the time you create this dashboard, there may only be one PlowedStatus category. You can add the other categories manually by clicking the + Category button and entering the other values.
We can also show the average speed of the plow trucks. Let’s add a Gauge.
NOTE: More details about the two types of gauges can be found here.
Tip: Under the Gauge tab and Guides section, click + Guide to add a color band to the gauge. Define the range with either a value or a percentage. Guides can be used to indicate ranges that are OK and dangerous.
The title you see on the top of the dashboard is only visible to you, because you are in edit mode. Let’s add a Header with a title for our users.
Let’s add some interactivity to this dashboard.
It would be nice to zoom the map to a complaint when one is clicked in the list.
We can also add a dropdown to our header that allows the user to filter the map to display only one truck at a time. This is done by adding a Selector.
Showing all the tracks isn’t always helpful. Let’s add another Date Selector that lets the user trim the vehicle tracks to various time windows.
You did it! You created an impressive real-time dashboard with Operations Dashboard for ArcGIS. Feel free to customize the colors and aesthetics some more. Your dashboard should look similar to this live sample.
From the dashboard users can easily answer the questions we discussed at the beginning:
Now, share it with colleagues or friends to show off your amazing work!
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