Self-hosted embedded BI should be given a long and hard look.
Let’s say a solution’s integrator, software vendor, or agency wants to embed white-label dashboards and reports. The information they use to build such dashboards and reports may originate from various sources, depending on their business.
They may have their internal database, but combining data from different Cloud-based API sources is a fairly frequent situation we encounter at 5000fish. Alternately, they may have designed their application so that they wish to report using their APIs rather than using a BI solution to report straight from their database layer.
The primary use for embedded BI tools like Yurbi is this. When a business wants to buy a BI tool, it must find a solution that works with the location of its data and how it wants to make it available to users. Self-hosted embedded BI solutions can be pretty helpful in this situation. Although there are cloud-based integrated BI suppliers (i.e., those who are not self-hosted) who offer the features, they all have drawbacks.
This guide will break down some key definitions and the benefits of using self-hosted embedded BI tools for API endpoint reporting.
What is Embedded BI?
Embedded BI is a tool’s ability to quickly and efficiently embed dashboards, visualizations, data, reports, and other information into your business’s existing software application.
By utilizing visualization, real-time analytics, and interactive reporting, BI solutions promote an improved user experience.
Embedded BI is anticipated to enable significant customization, to match the look and feel of the business application. This is commonly referred to as white label. The goal of white-label embedded analytics is simple– integrating third-party analytics functions into an existing application while also being white-labeled.
Understanding Self-Hosted vs. Cloud-Hosted Embedded BI
Cloud-Hosted and Self-Hosted BI have some noticeable differences. Cloud-Hosted BI eliminates the need for the business to purchase and maintain all of its servers and networks to operate the software because the hosted service provider is in charge of such duties.
Like the advantages of Software-as-a-Service software, Cloud-Hosted BI provides many advantages. Lack of owning and managing infrastructure is the largest one.
However, the trade-off to this benefit is the lack of control of a critical component of your business app. By integrating with a Cloud-Hosted embedded BI provider, a core component of your software is now dependent on 3rd party infrastructure management and additional data privacy and compliance concerns that a 3rd party vendor has access to your critical customer data.
The Downfalls of Cloud-Hosted Embedded BI
There are some pretty glaring faults in cloud-hosted embedded BI solutions that make self-hosted solutions look significantly more attractive:
- This type of technology has a high total cost.
- You'll need to make your app and data accessible to a third-party network, which might expose your data to security or compliance risks.
- Dealing with the overall complexity of integration and data synchronization with a third-party vendor can be challenging.
- Third-party vendors inevitably add branding control, white-label downtime, and update cycles.
Businesses can address some of these issues by utilizing self-hosted or on-premise BI tools.
What is White Labelling?
White labeling is creating goods and services, renaming them, and then using those names in advertising. Its goal is to boost customer loyalty and trust while reducing the time and resources required for creating and implementing new solutions.
Since the underlying software vendor manages all matters relating to software development and support, a white-label solution necessitates the least amount of upfront capital expenditure by a business looking, in this case, for embedded BI.
Once the business has given the product the appearance and feel of its brand, it may start selling the item on its own, bringing in money while splitting the commission with the service or technology supplier. For many businesses, having a white-label reporting solution is key to their company branding.
What Do Businesses Need in Terms of API Endpoint Reporting?
There are a few standard requirements that a solution vendor has while trying to extract data from multiple sources, databases, spreadsheets, and APIs:
- They desire customized reports that can be easily white-labeled and incorporated.
- To safeguard the data and guarantee there are no data leaks, they require customer-level/multi-tenant security.
- They want to be able to connect to a wide range of authentication methods and APIs from various providers.
- To create a good report, they must mix data from several sources (perhaps from other cloud apps, internal data, or spreadsheet data).
- To prevent API endpoints from exceeding their licensing restrictions, they require a means to restrict network latency and API limits.
All of that is challenging when the data is hidden behind an API. Therefore, a solution provider will essentially need to engage an API Developer to create a bespoke data warehouse, a custom application, or custom reports. This may be expensive and tiresome.
Luckily, Yurbi is a top-notch alternative.
Yurbi as a Self-Hosted On-Premise Embedded BI Tool for API Endpoint Reporting
Many of the problems with this use case are resolved by Yurbi's self-hosted and on-premise white-label integrated dashboards and reporting solutions. Yurbi operates as follows:
- Install Yurbi on a server that you own or a cloud server. You have complete control over the installation, access, security, etc., from there.
- The API connection can then be configured following your cloud vendor's specifications. The API endpoints you want to retrieve data can then be configured.
- Yurbi will automatically create a set of database tables to hold all the API results when you first fetch data from the endpoint. The new data will then be downloaded, and the current database tables will be refreshed by Yurbi, which you can schedule to fetch the API endpoint at any frequency you need.
Now that you have those database tables, you can create your customized reports and dashboards in Yurbi just like any other database. Without writing any code, it's possible to combine data from different sources and do a lot more.
The Benefits of Yurbi
Let's analyze some of the advantages of self-hosted on-premise BI products like Yurbi for firms that require reliable API endpoint reporting now that we have a better understanding of how such technology operates and how it is implemented.
- Your security improves. You may now limit access to the data at the client and data levels and share it with anybody, even if they don't have a SaaS tool user or license.
- Your team has more control over your data. Your server's location, data, privacy and security settings, frequency of updates, etc., are all completely within your control. You are not at the mercy of a cloud provider's whims, who may upgrade you anytime, have data or security breaches, etc.
- Local accessibility has tons of benefits. You may use the database where the data is stored to arrange and modify the data as necessary for easier reporting since you have access to the database. This is important since sometimes API-based data doesn't arrive in a format appropriate for reporting.
- Fewer restrictions apply to your querying process. There are fewer limitations when running a report than simply requesting the API. APIs provide constraints on how frequently, how much data, how many times you may query them, etc. If several individuals are doing the reports, you may run across those. You only have access to the data in a self-hosted on-premises design since you are querying database tables, which limits your exposure to API.
- You can finally unlock all of your data in one place. If you need to import your old data to a different vendor, decide to stop using the SaaS provider, or are locked out for any other reason, you still have all of your data. Yurbi simplifies exporting data and putting it in the format you choose easier than working with a vendor's export options.
- Data blending is simplified. Data blending is made more accessible by self-hosted BI systems hosted on-premise. Since Yurbi enables you to extract data from several sources and create custom computations, you no longer need to merge data exported from various SaaS vendors in Excel manually.
With these benefits, you can be sure that using Yurbi and self-hosted embedded BI tools will give you more comfort than headaches in the long run.
Our support team at Yurbi is here to help your development team get the right APIs configured. We’re currently working on adding additional features and controls to Yurbi, such as API call optimizations and improved integration capabilities. We’re also working on adding additional support for non-JSON API response packages.