Lightdash Templates

Why can’t building dashboards be as easy as copy and pasting some code? With Lightdash Templates, it is!

‍

Lightdash Templates: Analytics Made Easy
‍

Across different organisations there are some constants when it comes to BI reporting. It’s likely some of the dashboards we have built internally would be helpful for you and vice versa. No more reinventing the wheel, Lightdash Templates let you skip right to the Insights.

These Templates are dashboard-as-code .yml files that you copy over to your dbt project, and then upload to your Lightdash instance. Instantly creating a dashboard in lightning fast time.

‍

‍

‍

How do I get started?
‍

As an organisation, you might be using Google BigQuery as your data warehouse. You’re in good company! With over 30% of Lightdash orgs running their SQL through BigQuery, we are likely asking a similar question - how is BigQuery being used?

‍

Enter the bigquery-usage-tracking Template. This template will take you from a simple dbt model pointed at your information schema, to a dashboard in Lightdash in just a few minutes. From scratch, the steps look like this:

• Create a model in dbt using your BigQuery information schema. Then use lightdash dbt run to build the model and create the .yml file.
• Copy the template from the lightdash-templates repo into your dbt repo.
• Run lightdash upload and your dashboard will be ready!
• Time for a well-earned coffee break.

‍

Once dashboards have been created in this way, they are treated the same a dashboard you might have handcrafted yourself in the app. That means you get access to all the awesome features you would expect when using Lightdash. You can edit and save them, you can set up scheduled deliveries and alerting, you can use them as an exploration starting point… you get the idea.

‍

Community Contributions
‍

Right now, we have a couple of templates on offer, but we know there are opportunities for more. Have you built a dashboard at your organisation that you think others could benefit from? Open a PR and help your fellow Lightdashers today!

‍

Zero to dashboard times can now be measured in minutes with Lightdash Templates.

‍