The previous recipe has given us a glimpse of how we can collect the various metrics from our application during its runtime. We've also seen how powerful the ability to visualize this data as a set of graphs of historical trends can be.

While Grafana and Graphite offer us the very powerful capability of manipulating the data in the form of graphs and building elaborate dashboards that are full of thresholds, applied data functions, and much more, sometimes we want something simpler, more readable, and something widgety. This is exactly the kind of dashboard experience that is provided by Dashing.

Dashing is a popular dashboard framework developed by Shopify and written in Ruby/Sinatra. It provides you with an ability to create an assortment of dashboards that are comprised of different types of widgets. We can have things such as graphs, meters, lists, numeric values, or just plain text to display the information.

In this recipe, we will install the Dashing framework, learn how to create dashboards, send and consume the data to report from an application directly as well as fetch it from Graphite, and use the Dashing API to push the data to the Dashing instance.