Building a Real-Time Analytics Dashboard

DataViz Inc sold business intelligence, but their own product showed yesterday's numbers. Reports ran as overnight batch jobs, so by the time a customer acted on a trend it had often already turned. They needed the dashboard to reflect the business as it happened, without melting the database every time someone opened a chart. We separated the write path from the read path. Events stream into an append-only store and are continuously rolled up into pre-aggregated views, so a dashboard query reads a small, ready-made summary instead of scanning raw events live. A streaming layer pushes updates to the browser over websockets, so the numbers move on screen without anyone hitting refresh. Charts that used to lag a full day now update within seconds of the underlying event, and they do it under real load because the expensive aggregation happens once on write, not on every view. DataViz turned "real-time" from a roadmap promise into the feature their sales team leads with.