How we use RAW internally: a Business Activity API and Dashboard

Intro

At RAW we eat our own dog food – that’s the best way to give immediate feedback to our Product and R&D teams – and of course test the latest updates that are coming thick and fast.

As an emerging software vendor, we’re interested in key business metrics, but also understanding user behaviours so we can iterate and improve quickly. We also need to measure our outbound efforts vs. results, and where best to focus our time and budget. Lastly, we don’t want to wait for data to be collated, cleaned, integrated – we want it now.

We use RAW to connect to both our internal operational data and external data from software services that we use, and serve this up as an integrated data set via an API, which we then share around the company. Our users then connect to this API to pull out the data using many tools – such as an Excel Spreadsheet.

Let’s dig into how we create this Business Activity API

Our Business Metrics & Data Sources

Here are some of our most important data sources and the metrics we want to get out:

• RAW User Registrations, Logins and System Usage – from inside our own platform
• Cloud Costs – from our AWS Billing Reports
• Social Media metrics – we use Twitter and Linkedin
• Website statistics (sessions, page hits and other Information) – we use Google Analytics
• Web site additions (blogs, news, videos) – we use WordPress
• Forum posts and other activity – we use Discourse
• Support tickets, resolutions and other metrics – from JIRA

We use our RAW platform to query these, directly from source, and serve up a Business Activity API which is then made available securely within the company – and read directly from an Excel spreadsheet with standard Power Query functionality.

All the data is live, up to the minute too. No batches. No waiting.

Creating the Business Activity API

Because the result set we want is an integrated data set from many different sources, we actually create our API on top of many other APIs. Each source either has its own API, which we will use (e.g. Twitter’s API), or RAW can create an API from the underlying databases, files or other datasets.

We write the simple RAW SQL code and commit to GitHub, then our DataOps platform will pick it up, validate and deploy. You can read more about this over in our tutorial docs.

Using the Business Activity API

Now we have our API, we can call it using any method: Python, Curl, Java, etc. Here’s a Curl example:

curl 'https://api.raw-labs.com/v1/private/activity?datefrom=2022-06-01&dateto=2022-06-08&key=xxxxxxxxxxxxx'

That’s great for the techies, but this output is needed by more business facing people, and Excel and other end user tools are their friends. To use the API into Excel we can use standard Excel and Power Query functionality, via the dialogue box below (under “Data >> Get Data >> From Web” menu)

Excel is very easy to use, and many people are now comfortable with Power Query, refreshing external data sets, and even creating auto-refreshing, and parameterised calls to external data. You can of course use any BI / Reporting tool.

Our output uses standard Pivot Tables, which are fine for what we need, and flexible too. The data refresh comes from a standard “Data >> Refresh All” button on the ribbon. Here’s some examples of the type of analysis, remembering that this data comes from multiple integrated sources:

Wrap Up

That’s it for this blog post – Hopefully you can see that it’s easy to use RAW to create a Business Activity API from your key data sets: operational, financial, marketing and support. The API which serves the data can be read from many popular tools, so dashboards are flexible and can grow as you need.

We are building the fastest API creation and data sharing solution. Share data with your colleagues internally, or your external partners, clients or suppliers. For more information, get in touch with us today, or simply register, and start using!

Jeremy Posner, VP Product & Solutions, RAW Labs.

Want to learn more?

• Give RAW a try: Get Started for free!
• Why not follow us on LinkedIn, or Twitter, or join the conversation over at Reddit
• Read our Tutorials and Getting Started docs
• Like code? head on over to GitHub and look at our demo APIs
• Developer? Join us! we are looking for bright minds – at all levels of seniority, in databases, distributed systems, UI/UX.