About this tool

Motivation

Visualizing metrics is an incredibly common and valuable task. Virtually every department in a business likes to leverage data when making decisions. Time and time again I’ve seen developers implement one-off solutions for automatic reporting, sometimes quick and dirty, sometimes highly polished. For example:

  • A weekly email to the entire company showing the main engagement KPIs for the product.

  • A weekly Slack message to a team channel showing how many alerts the on-call team member had to respond to in the previous week.

  • A daily summary of sales numbers and targets.

Thanks largely to Grafana, teams are customizing real-time dashboards to always have an up-to-date view on the health of a system or the health of the business. However, there is often value in distilling a continuum of real-time metrics into a short digestible report. KPI Reporter attempts to make it easier to build such reports.

A few guiding principles that shape this project:

  1. It should be possible to run on-premises. It is far easier to run a reporting tool within an infrastructure due to the amount of data sinks that must be accessible. Security teams should rightly raise eyebrows when databases are exposed externally just so a reporting tool can reach in.

  2. It should be highly customizable. There should not be many assumptions about either layout or appearance. The shape and type of data ultimately will drive this.

  3. It should be possible to extend. The space of distinct user needs is massive. While the tool should aim to provide a lot of useful functionality out of the box, it will always be the case that custom extensions will be required to achieve a particular implementation. The tool should embrace this reality.

Pricing

KPI Reporter is free for personal use and by noncommercial organizations. All commercial users are required to obtain an annual license after 30 days. I believe that if you find enough value in the tool, this is a fair trade. You are free to implement your own third-party plugins at any time and distribute them under any license and/or pricing you wish.

Personal use is defined as:

Personal use for research, experiment, and testing for the benefit of public knowledge, personal study, private entertainment, hobby projects, amateur pursuits, or religious observance, without any anticipated commercial application.

A noncommercial organization is defined as:

Any charitable organization, educational institution, public research organization, public safety or health organization, environmental protection organization, or government institution, regardless of the source of funding or obligations resulting from the funding.

For more details, view the project license
 1# The Prosperity Public License 3.0.0
 2
 3Contributor: KPI Reporter LLC
 4
 5Source Code: https://github.com/kpireporter/kpireporter
 6
 7## Purpose
 8
 9This license allows you to use and share this software for noncommercial
10purposes for free and to try this software for commercial purposes for thirty
11days.
12
13## Agreement
14
15In order to receive this license, you have to agree to its rules.  Those rules
16are both obligations under that agreement and conditions to your license.  Don't
17do anything with this software that triggers a rule you can't or won't follow.
18
19## Notices
20
21Make sure everyone who gets a copy of any part of this software from you, with
22or without changes, also gets the text of this license and the contributor and
23source code lines above.
24
25## Commercial Trial
26
27Limit your use of this software for commercial purposes to a thirty-day trial
28period.  If you use this software for work, your company gets one trial period
29for all personnel, not one trial per person.
30
31## Contributions Back
32
33Developing feedback, changes, or additions that you contribute back to the
34contributor on the terms of a standardized public software license such as [the
35Blue Oak Model License 1.0.0](https://blueoakcouncil.org/license/1.0.0), [the
36Apache License 2.0](https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.html), [the MIT
37license](https://spdx.org/licenses/MIT.html), or [the two-clause BSD
38license](https://spdx.org/licenses/BSD-2-Clause.html) doesn't count as use for a
39commercial purpose.
40
41## Personal Uses
42
43Personal use for research, experiment, and testing for the benefit of public
44knowledge, personal study, private entertainment, hobby projects, amateur
45pursuits, or religious observance, without any anticipated commercial
46application, doesn't count as use for a commercial purpose.
47
48## Noncommercial Organizations
49
50Use by any charitable organization, educational institution, public research
51organization, public safety or health organization, environmental protection
52organization, or government institution doesn't count as use for a commercial
53purpose regardless of the source of funding or obligations resulting from the
54funding.
55
56## Defense
57
58Don't make any legal claim against anyone accusing this software, with or
59without changes, alone or with other technology, of infringing any patent.
60
61## Copyright
62
63The contributor licenses you to do everything with this software that would
64otherwise infringe their copyright in it.
65
66## Patent
67
68The contributor licenses you to do everything with this software that would
69otherwise infringe any patents they can license or become able to license.
70
71## Reliability
72
73The contributor can't revoke this license.
74
75## Excuse
76
77You're excused for unknowingly breaking [Notices](#notices) if you take all
78practical steps to comply within thirty days of learning you broke the rule.
79
80## No Liability
81
82***As far as the law allows, this software comes as is, without any warranty or
83condition, and the contributor won't be liable to anyone for any damages related
84to this software or this license, under any kind of legal claim.***

Obtaining a license

You can purchase a one-year license for $99/year (for individuals/small businesses) or $499/year (for larger businesses.) You can use discretion about which tier you belong to.

Comparisons

There are several existing products and applications that do some of what KPI Reporter does. Many of them do a far better job depending on your specific use-case. Here is a brief summary of the ones I know of.

Cloud SaaS

All of these services are rather sophisticated and focus on delivering user-friendly interfaces aimed at a wider range of skill-sets. They are also more expensive for that reason. Most support some overlapping (and typically wider) set of data sources and reporting/visualization capabilities as KPI Reporter.

  • Chartio: subscriptions start at $40/month per user after a 14 day trial.

  • Databox: subscriptions start at $49/month for 10 users and 10 data sources.

  • Daily Metrics: a subscription is $10/month

  • Grafana Enterprise Reporting: pricing is only available on request, putting it safely above any of the other products.

  • Grow.com: pricing available on request, similar to Grafana Enterprise.

  • Klipfolio: a subscription is $70/month after a 14-day trial.

  • Sunrise KPI: a subscription is $15/month after a 14-day trial.

On-premises

  • Zoho Analytics: while principally another cloud SaaS product, Zoho Analytics is the only offering I could find that supports an on-premises deployment at time of writing. The on-premises version is $30/month per seat, with a minimum of 5 seats, so $150/month. The online version is $45/month for the same number of users.