These days, we find that giving users an overview of their business in the form of dashboards is one of the most popular forms of reporting solutions. These dashboards give the users a high-level understanding of how their business is performing. From them, the user is likely to further investigate whether their dashboard KPIs are looking good. A dashboard gives users the power to understand their business with minimal time and effort.

In this chapter, you will be able to create advanced and bespoke dashboards using a suite of plugins called CTools. CTools is a suite of plugins/components for creating and maintaining advanced dashboards in the Pentaho BI server, available in the Pentaho Marketplace. These can be used in Pentaho Enterprise Edition or even in Pentaho Community Edition. In the more recent Pentaho version, CTools comes preinstalled. However, for the Pentaho EE version, you will need to install the Pentaho Marketplace from http://community.pentaho.com and then install the CTools plugins. Based on that, if you follow the procedure in this chapter in Pentaho EE, install Marketplace and CTools before you start the recipes.