# Dashboards

Data visualization is still the most effective way of telling a data story. Data analysts can bundle 1000s of data points into one single chart to show a meaningful trend, which might be hard to understand just by looking at the raw data.

There are already a number of data visualization tools in the market, why one more. There are two primary reasons to include a data visualization capability in Clarista.

1. Current BI offerings were created for the desktop era. Most of them do not use cloud native technologies (distributed architectures), hence not suitable for large data volumes or real-time data visualization.
2. Current Dashboards can only connect to one data source at a time. Modern businesses are increasingly relying not only on their data sources, but also on their business partners' data, stored in another cloud and network.

Clarista Pulse overcomes these challenges through its **cloud native, real-time and multi-cloud BI solution**, developed using distributed architecture to auto-scale based on data volumes and data query complexity. Each chart or table within Clarista Pulse can be sourced from a different source and none of the data needs to be pre-cached, a bit limitation of traditional data visualization tools.

### <mark style="color:purple;">Key Features:</mark>

Clarista Pulse provide many useful features:

1. Rich library of charts including relational charts, geo-maps, ranking charts, statistical charts, heat-maps, KPIs, pivot tables etc.
2. Multi-tab support
3. Dynamic filters and data filters
4. Drill-through capabilities to analyze underlying data
5. Support for parameterized charts backed by parameterized queries.
6. Multi-cloud and hybrid cloud support
7. Use of common meta-data through Clarista Catalog
8. Built-in data lineage to see data dependencies
9. Inheritance of data masking controls via Clarista Navigator

## <mark style="color:blue;">How are Clarista Pulse dashboards different from other BI tools?</mark>

**Performance, Common Meta-data, Change Management** - Clarista overcomes the performance challenges faced by traditional BI products, by combining two distributed architectures - distributed queries (Clarista MPP engine) and distributed BI. A combination of these two technologies provide the best performance for real-time data than any other BI option.

One of the biggest headaches with traditional BI tools are that BI analysts have to manually update technical column headers with business friendly column headers, for each chart and dashboard. Not with Clarista. Clarista Pulse integrates with Clarista Navigator to use the standard data headers, stored in Clarista Data Dictionary.

Time to show off some nerdy stuff. Clarista not only provides dynamic filters like other BI tools, but also allows the data analysts to turn complex query parameters (e.g., database stored procedure parameters) into Dashboard filters. This allows Clarista Pulse users to visualize data using complex multi-step queries that cannot be handled in a single SQL statement.

Last but not the least are the change management headaches with traditional BI tools. Imagine the move from your on-premises data warehouse to Cloud Data Warehouse or from moving a file from your Data Lake to your Data Warehouse. Every BI dashboard relying on the old source will need to be repointed to new source. In comparison, Clarista Pulse leverages Clarista's unique Semantics layer to source all data, hence when you decide to move your data from one source to another (e.g., from Data Lake to Data Warehouse), all you need to do is repoint the Semantics layer to the new data source and not worry about updating every chart and dashboard.
