Challenges with large datasets and multiple dashboard instances

External Apps
1

We use a business app that tracks tickets, projects, and time entries. It has horrible dashboards, but the database with all the info is accessible via REST API. So, I have built several dashboards to display different types of data, and then we display these all over our workplace for visibility. It's great.

But the business app has limits on how many API calls we can do every hour. Which is fine, until I start creating more and more and more of these Retool dashboards. Each dashboard is pulling all the same data from the business app, so that each dashboard can have its own local copy of the data.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how I could decrease the load on the business app API? The built-in Retool database is far too small for me to be able to use that.

I feel like going and setting up another database, like Amazon Redshift or the like, would take a lot of time for me to learn and implement and integrate into all the existing dashboards. Is that the only option? Does anyone have any suggestions? I've been thinking about this for a while, and can't seem to come up with any good ideas.

2

Depending on how often you need the data to refresh, have you looked at setting caching times in your queries or code blocks?

3

I have a JavaScript query that controls when all the Rest Api queries are run. Some, like querying for time entries, are run every five minutes, because this data changes often. Some, like querying companies, are done once a day. I save the results in a variable, rather than letting the query cache. Part of the reason for using variables is the queries have to be run multiple times to get all the paged data, so I just add the results to the variable.

I think my problem is that every one of our employees needs to have an instance of the Dashboard at their desk, plus all the dashboards that are displayed around the workplace. Each dashboard is pulling the same data. I wish I could make the data accessible in one location, but I don’t know how to do that.