Redash v5 Quick Start Guide

Create and share interactive dashboards using Redash

Alexander Leibzon, Yael Leibzon

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781788996167
• eBook ISBN: 9781788994217
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Data Modelling & Design
• Index: Computer Science

Learn how to quickly generate business intelligence, insights and create interactive dashboards for digital storytelling through various data sources with Redash

Key Features

• Learn the best use of visualizations to build powerful interactive dashboards
• Create and share visualizations and data in your organization
• Work with different complexities of data from different data sources

Book Description

Data exploration and visualization is vital to Business Intelligence, the backbone of almost every enterprise or organization. Redash is a querying and visualization tool developed to simplify how marketing and business development departments are exposed to data. If you want to learn to create interactive dashboards with Redash, explore different visualizations, and share the insights with your peers, then this is the ideal book for you.

The book starts with essential Business Intelligence concepts that are at the heart of data visualizations. You will learn how to find your way round Redash and its rich array of data visualization options for building interactive dashboards. You will learn how to create data storytelling and share these with peers. You will see how to connect to different data sources to process complex data, and then visualize this data to reveal valuable insights.

By the end of this book, you will be confident with the Redash dashboarding tool to provide insight and communicate data storytelling.

What you will learn

• Install Redash and troubleshoot installation errors
• Manage user roles and permissions
• Fetch data from various data sources
• Visualize and present data with Redash
• Create active alerts based on your data
• Understand Redash administration and customization
• Export, share and recount stories with Redash visualizations
• Interact programmatically with Redash through the Redash API

Who this book is for

This book is intended for Data Analysts, BI professionals and Data Developers, but can be useful to anyone who has a basic knowledge of SQL and a creative mind. Familiarity with basic BI concepts will be helpful, but no knowledge of Redash is required.

Installing Redash

Once you've decided to go for a self-hosted Redash, it's time to decide which installation you should perform.

This chapter is intended for people with some knowledge of the Linux operating system. If you choose to install Redash on a machine that already contains production services, take extra care when manually executing operations. You will need root privileges on the machine.

The information you'll find in this chapter has been checked for correctness and is accurate regarding the current version and installation procedure of Redash. For up to date data, please refer to the official Redash website!

• Setup page: https://redash.io/help/open-source/setup
• Dev-guide (always useful): https://redash.io/help/open-source/dev-guide/

Although it is technically possible to run Redash on Windows OS, it is highly recommended that you use a Linux machine, especially for production configuration.

Windows users who want to experiment are encouraged to do so in a VM or a container. Win 10/Windows Server 1709 and later users can take advantage of the Linux subsystem for Windows.

From the Windows official website: The Windows subsystem for Linux lets developers run Linux environments, including most command-line tools, utilities, and applications directly on Windows, unmodified, without the overhead of a virtual machine.

More information on how to install your favorite Linux distribution on Windows can be found here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/about. After you have installed your Linux distro, continue installing as if you had a native Linux machine.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Sizing – choosing the right machine to do the job
• Installation options and installation walkthrough
• Explaining the main setup script
• Troubleshooting
• Configuration and setup
• Permissions in Redash

Sizing – choosing the right machine to do the job

Sizing is based on the number of concurrent users and the number of concurrent queries that you have. For <10 concurrent users and <100 active queries, a tiny machine that has a dual core, 2 GB memory should be enough.

On the other hand, if you have 50-100 concurrent users and 1,000 active queries, you will need at least 16-32 GB RAM and a quad-core CPU.

In addition to the Redash app, you will also need Postgres, Redis, and Celery.

• Redis - Memory intensive
• Postgres - CPU and memory
• Celery - CPU and memory (the more workers you have, the more CPU you need. If workers won't keep up and build up a queue, it starts to consume memory)

If you're hosted in the cloud, you can always start with a smaller machine and expand if needed. The same goes for deploying Redash inside a VM in your own data center.

As a good starting point, you can use the following instance types on GCE/AWS:

• On AWS: t2.medium (2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM)
• On GCE: n1-standard-1/ n1-standard-2 (1/2 vCPU and 4/8 GB RAM accordingly)

For more intensive usage:

• On AWS: m4.2xlarge/m5.2xlarge (both with 8vCPU, 32 GB RAM)
• On GCE: n1-standard-8 (8vCPU, 32 RAM)

Installation options and installation walkthrough

In this section, we will cover the options you have when installing Redash. If your machine resides in the cloud, you will be able to choose an existing image of Redash with all the necessary components already predefined.

In case you prefer to have more control over the installation, you can run the setup.sh script or manually run Docker installation.

Installation options

There are various installation options for Redash, and they are as follows:

For the Cloud (AWS/GCE):

• Using a predefined image
• Manually using a Setup script

For your own datacenter (VM or Physical Machine):

• Docker
• Manually using a Setup script
  In all of the aforementioned options, you can provide your own Postgres/Redis, in case you already have them installed.

As we already seen in the Redash architecture chart from the previous chapter, Redash needs Postgres (version 9.3 or newer) and Redis (version 2.8 or newer) to operate.

Both Postgres and Redis can be installed separately (if you already have them installed, then you can configure Redash to use them using environment variables).

Redash releases are located here: https://github.com/getredash/redash/releases.

AWS-predefined image

This is a very easy type of installation, since everything is packed into a convenient image. To pick a specific image, you can...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright and Credits
• Packt Upsell
• Foreword
• Contributors
• Preface
• Introducing Redash
• Installing Redash
• Creating and Visualizing your First Query
• Connecting to Data Sources
• Writing and Executing Queries
• Creating Visualizations
• Dashboards and Practical Tips
• Customizing Redash
• Other Books You May Enjoy