How frequently is data updated?
Octoboard collects data from cloud applications using publicly available programmatic interfaces (APIs). How often data is updated by Octoboard depends on how frequently cloud platforms provide information to us and on your selected Octoboard product and subscription.
In most cases Octoboard will know when data becomes available and will try to retrieve it. When a dashboard is displayed in a web browser or on an office TV screen, Octoboard will keep constantly retrieving information whenever new updates are available via known API.
Cloud applications provide data at different time intervals and may introduce a data lag. Data lag is a delay in data availability to Octoboard via programmatic interface. It is not unusual, for example, for "native" data dashboards within Facebook to display data a few hours before the same data is sent to Octoboard via API. Such behaviour is normal for cloud applications that Octoboard connects to. They also differ in how they provide historical information.
Cloud platforms such as Google Analytics or paid advertising systems are quite good at providing historical values and making new data visible via APIs at hourly intervals. Applications such as Twitter or ActiveCampaign would not always offer historical data and data lag (delay) can be quite significant. If historical data is not available, Octoboard will keep collecting it over time. For such applications, the longer you keep Octoboard connected, the more data you will have in your dashboards and reports. Unfortunately, this also means that in the beginning there will be no historical data to report and most data comparisons (to previous periods, quarter or year) would result in empty dashboards and reports.
Yes. Octoboard is a true real-time system.
Octoboard can receive and display real-time events and messages streamed live by cloud platforms. For applications that offer real-time data, Octoboard will display data events almost as soon as they take place. Octoboard will constantly receive to real-time event streams from such applications and will keep adding event data to display widgets (graphs, tables, maps and pie charts).
Above approach is very different to what our competitors do. Most our competitors offer "real-time systems" by querying data every 5 minutes or every minute. Such an approach results in data being displayed with significant delay (it is not real-time). It also overloads your business network and infrastructure - competitors keep requesting data whether it is available or not.
With Octoboard, there is no need to refresh data screens or wait for next 5 minute refresh interval. Octoboard actively "listens" to new events. Widgets, tables and graphs will be populated with information that our system receives immediately. You can see examples of our real-time interfaces by visiting Octoboard real-time demo. Select "Live website traffic" or "Visitors - Leads - Purchases" dashboards to see events arriving live.
The following applications and systems can send real-time events to live Octoboard dashboards:
- Real-time client subscriptions to Email lists in ActiveCampaign
- Real-time trouble tickets raised in Devops platforms such as Zendesk (Freshdesk is currently in development)
- Real-time payments, new clients, transactions and charges in Stripe
- Real-time Zapier events sent by hundreds of cloud applications
- Real-time website traffic events from Octoboard own web analytics scripts - current website visitors, devices, location of website visitors and more.
When displayed on Office TV dashboards, real-time data views offer really engaging data visualisations. Real-time dashboards and TV Loops are used by business owners, management teams, sales, marketing, support, devops and financial departments around the world. For more information on sharing data in Octoboard, please read our tutorial Sharing data with clients and internal teams.
