Visual KPI Features
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What Makes Visual KPI Unique?

Multiple Data Sources
Visual KPI comes from industrial roots, so it natively reads from real-time historians (OSIsoft PI, GE, etc.), IoT/IIoT, relational & cloud databases, data warehouses & BI tools, manual data, business applications, web services and more. We support thousands of data sources. Learn more
KPIs = Clarity & Context
KPIs with status and color are core to our application, and this means users get clear obvious results without the need for deep training. It also lets you compare many types of data, even across multiple sources, with automatically generated performance roll-ups at every level of the hierarchy.
Beautiful & Obvious
There are plenty of powerful tools out there for real-time monitoring, but unfortunately, most are a bit ugly and require deep training to use and a big project to deploy. By combining consumer design, KPI clarity and industrial power, Visual KPI lets you put data in the hands of everyone for better, faster decisions.
Navigation & Hierarchy
Visual KPI goes way beyond dashboards. It also contains your full information hierarchy (or multiple). KPIs and other objects can be dynamically assembled into groups by standard or custom attributes and even automated based on your ever-changing data. Add live search for real-time results and ad-hoc grouping and it becomes unstoppable.
Real-Time Alerts
Transpara believes its software should be smart enough to tell you when to pay attention and where to look. Real-time alerts right to your device provide context and link right back to the spot where things went wrong. Alert templates allow for multiple alerting scenarios and even escalating alerts. Say goodbye to staring at a pile of numbers or sifting through screens waiting for something to happen.
On-Premise or In the Cloud
Visual KPI can be deployed easily (in about 90 minutes) wherever it makes sense to you and your IT team. We even support industrial networks and all public cloud vendors (AWS, Azure, Google, etc.). Most of our customers still choose on-premise due to strict security and data governance requirements, but we are cloud-ready if you need us to be.
Industrial-Strength Security
We love to talk security. A quick look at our customers should make this obvious: large-scale nuclear power, telecommunications, electric utilities, oil refineries, pharmaceuticals and more have relied on Visual KPI daily for more than a decade. We also have a “security inheritance” model that fits right into your existing IT environment, no matter how strange or strict.
Self-Service Analytics
Once KPIs are defined, most of Visual KPI’s visualizations are already running with no coding or screen design required. Admins or users can then take things further with drag and drop dashboards, ad-hoc or managed charts, filtering/grouping, and automated analytics that make your opportunities or problems jump right off the page.
Every Feature Works on Every Device
Visual KPI is a responsive web application, which means it goes beyond “working” on mobile devices. Every feature works and the software takes advantage of every screen size (no simple shrinking of screens) from phones to wall-mounted displays. Features include optimized layouts and visualizations to downsampling data based on screen size and shape.
“Adds value from day one. Great support team. Loved by end users.”

Julian Rouse, Area Manager
Core Features
Check back often or visit the release notes for new features. We release new software about every ten days so this is already out of date.
Web Client
Visual KPI runs in the a web browser for end users. That means nothing to install or manage, no data stored locally (secure), and support for any device or screen size.
It's Alive!
No need to refresh. As the data changes in your data sources, the visualizations update automatically in seconds. It’s modern design provides advanced speed without putting load on your data sources.
Unlimited Data Sources
Visual KPI supports thousands of data sources, and there is no limit to how many you can use at the same time (one of our customers uses 100+ sources concurrently). Data from different sources can be mixed and matched, calculated, nested and more.
OSIsoft PI & AF Support
Visual KPI has DEEP integration with OSIsoft PI, AF (Asset Framework) and most OSIsoft tools. Our native integration with AF fully automates Visual KPI and lets AF control the hierarchy and all configuration.
Remote Context Service
If you already have KPI definitions or a hierarchy in a separate system, our RCS technology can map and read the metadata from your source, eliminating the need to build objects or groups in the Visual KPI Designer. Fully automated and changes as your metadata does.
Alerts / Notifications
One of the key differentiators for Visual KPI, real-time alerts notify users or groups when KPIs cross limits. Includes support for alert templates, escalating alerts and reminders.
Tables & Table Search
Sometimes you need some tabular data sitting along side of your time-series data. Our tables feature lets you view maintenance logs, shift reports, or any other table you can query from a data source. Tables are fully searcheable too.
GPS Integration
Visual KPI supports geolocation on any object in the system, and when used with a device that has a GPS receiver and our Near Me feature you can sort and filter your data by the distance from the location you are standing. It even changes as you move around.
Custom Attributes
Visual KPI visualizations and hierarchy are driven by attributes. Add custom attributes to dynamically create groups, organize and pivot groups of KPIs and more. Attributes can also be automated and change based on your data sources.
Downsampling
Downsampling means optimizing the amount of data sent to your device. You might want to look at a year of sub-second data on your phone, but why bring millions of points to your phone if you only have a few hundred pixels on which to show it. Visual KPI intelligently matches the data to the device and updates it in real-time as you zoom or drag the view.
Mobile-Optimized
We go way beyond working on all of your devices. We started with mobile back in 2005 and all of our visualizations are optimized for it. Big, round dials take up a ton of space and are hard to compare with each other, especially on a phone or tablet. Every one of our charts is designed to look great on small devices and compare with its peers.
Visual KPI Designer
Manual configuration in Visual KPI is easy with the Excel-based Visual KPI Designer. There is no coding and if you know the basics of Excel you already know 80% of our software. For automated configuration, see the Remote Context Service feature.
Deploy Anywhere
Visual KPI is an in-memory web server application that runs on Windows Server. We did this on purpose, because it means we can fit in almost any IT environment, integrate with almost every security scenario, and live just as easily on premise or in a private or public cloud environment.
Embed Custom Content
You can embed any content that is supported in HTML. Want a video feed or HMI / process graphic on your dashboard? How about custom manual data entry forms linked from your KPIs? Just about anything is possible, even if we don’t include it natively. Oh, and you can embed our objects in other software too.
NMS Support
Network monitoring systems are another great data source for Visual KPI, and they become even more powerful when you combine their data with your other sources. How cool would it be to combine SolarWinds data with call center volume and social media sentiment?
Unlimited Dashboards
Create as many drag and drop real-time dashboards as you want. They can also be grouped into unlimited profiles, locked down, secured separately, hidden or linked.
Secure Sharing
Collaboration is critical and sharing what you see in real-time can mean the difference between a small problem and a crisis. Every screen and alert can be shared easily and it only sends links, not data. The links are useless if they end up in the wrong hands, and they point back to the live application showing even what has happened since the alert or share took place. Context and speed are kings.
OPC Support (ADI)
In most cases our customers are storing their OPC data in a historian and we read from that, but we also support OPC UA, DA, HDA and A&E when you add Visual KPI Enterprise ADI. It also adds a historian to store the real-time data and its history.
Rapid Deployment
Say goodbye to endless projects. A full system is deployed in about 90 minutes and can be done via a web meeting. Once deployed, configuration is either automated (Remote Context Service) or easily setup using the Excel-based Visual KPI Designer. You can even try the software with your own data sources and on your own server for free for 30 days.
High-Frequency Data
High-speed and slow moving or manual data are equally at home here. We have worked with everything from pico-second resolution (Google it) to data that only changes once a year. It doesn’t matter how fast your data changes, the important part is to know right when it does.
Hierarchy & Navigation
Relationships matter here. Some software just lets you create flat dashboards or displays but they don’t have relationships or a hierarchy you can drill into. Not only do we have a fully dynamic hierarchy, but performance is automatically rolled up at every level.
Historian Support
More than half of our customers have enterprise historians and we love them. We support pretty much all of them, including OSIsoft PI (and AF), GE Proficy, inmation, Wonderware InSQL, Rockwell FactoryTalk, Honeywell, Schneider, Yokogawa, ABB, AspenTech, OAS and many more. We also support all of the modern time-series databases like InfluxDB, Druid, TempoIQ and others. Ask us if you don’t see your favorite.
Advanced Trending
Trends (line charts, run chart) are a huge part of operations monitoring or any time-series visualization. Our automatic, ad-hoc and managed trends feature up to 20 pens per trend, time offsets, multi-scale, multiple cursors, export to table or CSV, threaded trend comments, calculations, snap-to mode, drag/zoom/pinch, future data support and more.
Real-Time Analytics
We call it “in-the-moment” or “live” analytics. We support everything from pivoting based on attributes, filtering by status or geolocation, and even automatic pareto charts showing which KPIs are performing better or worse over a specified time range. And of course everything updates as your data does.
No New Master Source
Visual KPI “reads” data in real-time from your data sources without the need to move anything or create a new master data source to manage and maintain (unless you need one). This makes it a fairly lightweight application that sits out in front of your data and eliminates much of the headaches of traditional BI project. It also means you can evaluate the software quickly without making any changes to your existing systems.
Live Search
You can search for any object in the system (groups, KPIs, charts, tables) from any page and receive immediate results with their live status as you type. See the ad-hoc groups feature to see what else search can do.
Ad-Hoc Groups
Use the search feature to make a group of KPIs or other objects regardless of how the admin setup the hierarchy. These ad-hoc groups have access to all the power of a normal group including multiple visualizations, filters, grouping and more.
Moving Object Support
Did you know our maps can support moving assets like trucks, trains, ships and even people? Just like most attributes, geolocation can be read directly from a data source which will result in your assets and their KPIs moving on the maps as they move in real life.
Embed in Other Apps
Every object in Visual KPI can be embedded, with or without its associated navigation, into any software that will accept a URL. Want our trends, GeoMaps or rollups in Sharepoint, your HMI or another portal? No problem.
Drop Zone (ADI)
Some data sources just aren’t meant to be read from by software. They might be old or just not meant for this purpose, but that doesn’t stop us from reading from them. With the DropZone feature of our Enterprise ADI product, we can catch csv exports, binary files and more and create/store the the time-series history.
Tons of Visualizations
There’s no way to list them all here, but visualizations include single KPI charts (trend, sparkline, bullet, SPC, etc.), group visualizations (rollups, KPI map, GeoMap, etc.), managed charts (bar chart, embedded content, gantt, pareto, pie, XY/scatter plot, tables) and ad-hoc visualizations.
Security Inheritance
Visual KPI was build to fit within your IT environment without imposing new requirements. And because its an in-memory IIS application we automatically support every security technology (RSA, VPN, 2FA, appliances, etc.) that Windows Server supports. Contact us if you have questions.
Fully Customizable
You are in control of the experience with no need to code. You can change status colors, naming, the language (even add your own), add your own logo, and even control what happens when you click on something. There are site-wide defaults and the ability to override those defaults on individual objects.
Industrial Scale
Wondering if we can handle your data requirements? Oil refineries often monitor many thousands of KPIs that are sampled up to hundreds of time per second and stored at full resolution for decades. We also handle the requirements of nuclear power, satellites, electrical grids and others. Scale is a prerequisite.
Calculations on the Fly
You can do simple or complex calculations on the fly and even across multiple data sources. Parameters feature lets you use nested calculations and include up to 10 separate data sources.
KPI Roll-Ups
Roll-ups are one of the most powerful and unique aspects of Visual KPI. They guide you right to where your problems are, regardless of how many metrics you have or how deep they are in the hierarchy. They also let you summarize totally different types of data (like machine data and finance data) in the same hierarchy. The ultimate contextual tool.
Ad-Hoc Visualizations
Create your own trends or other visualizations right from the browser, including reading new values from data sources even if they haven’t been defined as objects in the system.
Machine Learning / AI
We focus on monitoring, alerting and visualization, which means support for machine learning, artificial intelligence and future data are critical. The architecture lets you add your favorite vertical services for ML and AI and even correlate them with your real-time data on the fly or even alert on deviations from the models.
Object-Level Security
In addition to overall security (authentication, encryption, etc.), you define right down to the individual object who has access. This means multiple people could log in to the same page and see different sets of information based on their priveleges.
Reporting
Time-based dashboards blur the line between monitoring and reporting by allowing you to time-bind and entire dashboard. Think about your daily, weekly or monthly report as a link where people can go deeper or scroll forward or back in time. No more manual report generation or static pdfs. Yay!
Parameters
Give you the ability to use up to 10 data sources (including calculations and multiple tags/values each) inside of a single field of a KPI or a nested calculation. This also allows you to automate your attributes based on remote data (e.g. what is that machine making or that train carrying right now?; What is the start time for this batch?). Fairly limitless.
Trend Comments
Click anywhere on a trend or drag to highlight a time range and enter comments or reply to others (threaded discussion). Comments are stored in Visual KPI and can be exposed as visualizations.
SPC Trends
Statistical Process Control (SPC) is just a toggle away on any KPI. Automatically generates calculated control limits and displays the four critical Western Electric SPC rules. Imagine adding SPC in minutes instead of days or weeks.
Group Status
The Group Map visualization lets you define the status of a group based on the behavior of the KPIs in it and show select KPIs for the group in fixed positions. Group status can be determined by the worst performing KPI, most recently changed KPI or custom options.
JSON, XML, ODBC
Support for standard integration protocols like JSON, ODBC, Odata and more allow us to integrate with almost any source. Interfaces are easy to create and their simplicity makes them lightning fast and lightweight.
Any Device
Visual KPI works on any device with a browser, including phones, tablets, laptops, PC/Mac/Linux and that big screen on the wall. No apps to install, platform support to worry about, or IT and security footprint to manage. Every feature works on every device.
Operational Analytics
Business analytics and operational analytics are very different animals. BI teams and analysts already have great tools for crunching numbers and investigating past data sets or predicting the longer term future. Operation analytics are focused on the recent past, current and near future. We are the tool for that.
Manual Data Entry
Not all data is generated automatically. Sometimes you need the ability for users to enter or adjust values and record the history. Visual KPI supports manually entered values natively, embedded custom HTML forms, and integration with dedicated manual entry and forms apps.
Profiles & Watch Lists
Profiles are a core concept. You can have as many as you want, and each profile is a collection of dashboards, a watch list (a collection of your favorite KPIs), and a bookmark bar with quick links to your favorite locations inside or outside of Visual KPI. Profiles can be role-based or personal, secured, locked, hidden or grouped.
Links
You can add links (internal or external) to any object in the software and even adjust the behavior so clicking a KPI (for example) takes you to any location (like instructions on what to do, or launch an application to start a work order, etc). Links can also be put on dashboards, the bookmark bar, and the navigation menu.
Geolocation & Mapping
One of our sexiest and easiest features to implement. Any object (KPI, group, chart, etc.) can be given static or dynamic lat/long in seconds and its instantly mapped (with live status) and sortable by distance (when a GPS is present). Our maps even support moving objects!
Predictive Analytics (ADI)
This is one of the most powerful advancements in time-series data and monitoring in general. Visual KPI has always supported future data and the ability to read from predictive models right along side of your own data. We can even monitor and alert when things don’t go as expected.
Alert Templates
Alerts are core, and templates make them flexible and easy to implement. Each one is a unique scenario that can be applied to many KPIs and changed globally, regardless of their thresholds or who is being alerted. It also controls the content of the alerts.
Event Ranges
Time is a critical component of any real-time dashboard or monitoring software, but time doesn’t always mean its ongoing. Many industries rely on batches, shifts or other event-based time periods and we support that too.
Custom Status Options
In addition to the 10 KPI status options (that are defined by their limits or other means), Visual KPI includes 10 additional override status options that can be defined. Maybe instead of high or low, or good or bad, a KPI is “stale” (meaning it has a value, but it is older than you expect so you don’t want users to rely on it). Make your own, with custom colors, icons and more.
Multi-Language
Hola. Olá. Hallo. 你好. مرحبا. こんにちは. We now support any language in the web client, including adding your own. Data has always been supported in any language (or numerical format), but now you can even change “Dashboard” to “Cockpit” or add your favorite slang. No limits people. Nyt!
External Data
Want to combine weather, supplier information, market pricing or other external sources with your own data. No problem. We have native interfaces to sources like Quandl, MarketView and others but you can easily add your own.
Time-Series DB (ADI)
Most of our customers already have data sources that hold their current and historical data, but for those of you who don’t or want to make a change, we have you covered too. Give us a shout and ask about Enterprise ADI (Advanced Data Infrastructure).
Advanced Calcs (ADI)
There is an extensive list of calculation options and functions built right in, but sometimes you need more. Visual KPI Enterprise ADI includes a fully scriptable advanced calculation engine that pretty much allows anything. Curious?
Always Improving
It’s enterprise software, but we release updates way faster than the big guys. You can expect updates and new features at least every month (usually about every 10 days), and they are all included.
Take a Closer Look
Want to see some of these features in action? Have some questions you would like answered? We’re happy to arrange a quick web meeting to show you around. If so you can also try it with your own data for free.