Supercharge your Retool apps with stunning dashboards

Analytics is a must have for modern applications, whether they're internal or customer-facing. This is especially true for enterprise apps that manage internal business processes. Take, for example, an app that allows employees to submit support requests. For these types of business process management applications, it's crucial to have visibility at both individual and aggregate levels. At the individual level, users can leverage peer insights to make informed decisions. At the aggregate level, supervisors can better understand where requests are coming from, identify bottlenecks, and uncover areas for improvement.

Retool (opens in a new tab) is an excellent platform for building departmental apps. It enables you to quickly create, publish, and share enterprise apps without going through layers of IT approvals. When it comes to analytics, Retool provides some in-line charts to show quick insights. For simple use cases, this might be sufficient. However, if you're managing a critical business process that requires you to deliver tailored visibility at multiple levels of organization —where one size doesn't fit all—you'll likely want a personalized dashboard that caters to each stakeholder group.

The most efficient approach you can take to meet this requirement is by decoupling analytics from your core application code. This strategy offers several advantages. Firstly, it substantially enhances your iteration velocity, allowing for rapid adjustments and improvements to your analytics without affecting the main application. Secondly, it enables you to deploy changes much more quickly than traditional integrated approaches. This separation of concerns leads to increased flexibility and maintainability of both your application and analytics components. Furthermore, it allows specialized teams to work on each part independently, potentially improving overall quality and innovation.

This is where the Sempahor + Retool integration shines. You can now effortlessly launch fully interactive dashboards within your Retool applications in a few simple steps. This approach not only streamlines the development workflow but also ensures your analytics capabilities can grow with your application needs, minimizing friction. Let's see it in action.

Step 1: Request a free trial here (opens in a new tab).

Once you log in, you'll see a demo dashboard created for you. With Semaphor, you can connect to any SQL-compatible databases, including CSV files, Parquet files in Amazon S3, or responses from REST APIs.

Step 2: Create a dashboard using natural language, SQL, or Python.

The Semaphor console allows you to customize the dashboard's appearance—including colors, fonts, corner styles, and layouts for various devices—giving you precise control over how it renders in your app.

Step 3: Publish it as a custom component to your Retool App.

Clone the template repository and install dependencies

git clone https://github.com/rohitspujari/retool-semaphor-component.git
cd retool-semaphor-component
npm install

Initialize the component library

npx retool-ccl init
 
npx retool-ccl init  1 ✘ ╱ 19s ╱ base 
? What name would you like to give your library of components? semaphor
? What description would you like to give ? make my data dance and insights shine
 
Creating new library in the Retool backend..
...Succesfully made new library!
Writing updates to package.json

Start the component in dev mode, and go to the Retool console. You can then search for seamphor in the components section and drag it onto your canvas.

In the component properties, provide semaphor dashboard Id and secret to render the dashboard.

npx retool-ccl dev

Once you are happy with the template, you can publish it to Retool.

npx retool-ccl deploy

That's it! Now you can render fully interactive dashboards in your Retool app within minutes. If you have any questions feel free to get in touch with us at support@semaphor.cloud