Visivo is the most dev friendly and secure analytics

We recently spent some time evaluating analytics products to power our internal dashboards at RWX. We selected Visivo, and we're thrilled with its security model and code-driven approach to building dashboards.

When we originally started the company, we used Quicksight. We chose it for one big reason: it was hosted by AWS, making it easy to keep our data inside our AWS account. We were reluctant to use third-party services which would require exposing our databases across the Internet, or going through arduous configuration steps to establish VPN connections. We could have run self-hosted products ourselves, but we didn't want to take on that overhead either.

Quicksight was sufficient for getting started, but we weren't totally happy with the configuration. We wanted our analytics checked into version control for all the usual reasons: change history, collaboration, and security.

Visivo provides a unique approach to analytics. Most business intelligence tools require establishing connections to your underlying databases, but Visivo does not. Instead, you run a CLI which pushes dashboards to Visivo, providing only the data that's relevant for the charts. It's a huge improvement in security over giving a tool unfettered access to databases.

Additionally, Visivo takes an infrastructure as code (IaC) approach to building dashboards. Using code enables us to keep our analytics in version control. We can easily see change history, collaborate on them, and apply our normal security practices for approving and deploying changes.

We use the stages feature of Visivo to build review apps for dashboard changes as well as promoting changes through our staging environment before going to production.

The ease of developing and maintaining dashboards has resulted in our team quickly building a much higher degree of visibility into our data.

And of course, we manage our entire CI/CD pipeline for our analytics with Mint. You can see how to do this in the Visivo deployment docs.

If you have any questions about how we're using Visivo, feel free to ping our engineering team on our Discord server or reach out directly at [email protected]