An admin dashboard serves a variety of internal businesses, such as customer management systems for customer support, CRMs for sales, candidate management tools for recruiting, or CRUD applications for data resources management. This article discusses why you need an admin dashboard, how it helps with your business, and fours aspects that you might want to pay special attention to when constructing an admin dashboard.

Why an admin dashboard?

Admin dashboards are efficient internal tools. They can reduce the workload of the developer team significantly with respect to providing support to other teams within the company. If the developing engineers are requested to achieve the same tasks repeatedly, then it's probably time to improve your admin panel.

Besides, admin dashboards provide an easy way for enterprises to quickly update data or perform information retrieval. For instance, enabling free-delivery for an order, or refunding the payment of a user's latest purchase. You can also use the admin backend to add tags to your users or track the status of the orders.

If you are from an international e-commerce teams, then you may need some built-in tools in the admin dashboard for content management, such as updating the number of items in stock, adding new items, and removing unavailable ones. In addition, admin dashboards are excellent tools to enhance data insights. For example, track shipments, compute average revenue per user, or monitor anything else you are interested in.

What to look for when developing an admin backend

With a clear understanding of what admin dashboards are and why we need them, let's now figure out the key features of a great admin dashboard. Keep in mind that the goal of having an admin dashboard is to reduce the workload of developers, so it is expected to be easy to maintain. Additionally, standing in the shoes of users, it should be easy to use, supporting a wide variety of use cases, and offering flexible authorization methods.

Front-end interface

To design an awesome admin dashboard, the UI team needs to consider the details of the supported workflows, the connection between different sections, and then create interactive and informative pages accordingly. For example, if you need to manage orders from customers, then you may want one webpage to perform create, read, update and delete (CRUD) operations, and another to display visuals from data analysis.

It is recommended to have one more separate page on your admin dashboard for the frequently searched information and the common fixes of this admin tool.

Diverse front-end components are needed for the interface of your admin dashboard, but you don't have to build all from 0. Instead, you can consider using libraries, templates, modules, and more, to avoid repetitive work and improve productivity. For instance, to display analytics on the data dashboard, you can use React Charts, or Google Charts according to your development environment.

Selecting a library with an active and dedicated community with a pure focus on functionality makes it easier to maintain and enhance your dashboard.

Authentication and authorization

Although numerous password managers are available, many people don't like to use them, especially when it's necessary to frequently update the password of the password manager account to maintain its high security. In addition, you wouldn't want anyone outside of your company to have access to your user management system. All of these reasons make single sign-on (SSO) a good authentication option.

Restricting outside users to access the dashboard simplifies the implementation of the authorization methods. Specifically, you can attribute authorization types as read-only or editable, and then assign these roles based on job requirements (RBAC, Role-Based Access Control). For example, a development engineer needs full access to the customer information board, but it's fine for the product department to have read-only access to perform data analytics.

An easy way to manage permissions in the admin dashboard is to use a switch tool. You can create a switch for each task and permission, and then turn them on or off based on user ID.

Auditability

Admin dashboard users have access to many operations, such as deleting or modifying entries in the database. Thus, it's extremely important to keep a record of the user's actions so you can recover from accidental changes.

Implementing audition is easiest when the front-end and back-end are separated and the back-end is accessed via a REST API, because you can store all requests to the backend in an audit log. However, if you connect directly to the database from the front-end, keeping an audit log becomes complex. Concretely, you need either keep a record of all front-end logs or rely on the functionality provided by the database. For example, AWS DynamoDB has built-in auditing support from AWS CloudTrail, and Amazon Aurora can push audit logs to CloudWatch.

Ease of Maintenance

All components of an admin dashboard (front-end, back-end, deployment, etc.) should be easy to maintain, which means that we need to leverage off-the-shelf tools and existing libraries whenever possible.

One of the great benefits of using tools created by a professional company is that they regularly update the product, offer plug-ins to support rich integrations with other systems, maintain the documentation and tutorials. Sometimes, they also manage a community of developers to help you out when you get stuck. But if you choose to develop your internal tools from scratch, you are pushing yourself away from all these shortcuts.

To avoid buiding everything from 0 to 1 and to utilize available resources, we introduce Openblocks, a developer-friendly low-code platform. Using Openblocks, you can build internal tools without the need to understand all the details of frameworks like React/Vue. It allows you to quickly connect the front-end and back-end to a variety of data sources like MySQL, MongoDB, etc., and then easily build fully functional dashboards with a set of out-of-the-box components.

Openblocks also supports tenant management, fine-grained permission control, audit logs and other commonly used features in internal systems. On Openblocks, you can build apps within minutes with full guarantee of the security of your enterprise data.

Conclusion

I hope you now have a better understanding of admin dashboards. We've introduced how an admin dashboard is important, how to make it secure, how to modify data through backend authentication, and how to easily build a usable frontend, etc. Always remember that the focus of an admin panel is to reduce the workload of developers, so keep it as simple and practical as possible.