Research Dashboard¶
This page gives an overview of the Research Dashboard, describing its current status, where and how it's developed and deployed, and who is responsible for maintaining it.
Service Description¶
This service allows those involved in research administration to view:
- Grant finances (summary expenditure, grant balances and team details)
- Application deadlines
- Contract status and progress updates
Service Status¶
The Research Dashboard is currently beta.
The Research Dashboard service is planned to be migrated to a more standard GCP Cloud Run deployment.
Contact¶
Technical queries and support should be directed to devops@uis.cam.ac.uk and will be picked up by a member of the team working on the service. To ensure that you receive a response, always direct requests to devops@uis.cam.ac.uk rather than reaching out to team members directly.
Issues discovered in the service or new feature requests should be opened as GitLab issues in the application repository.
Environments¶
The Self-Service Gateway is currently deployed to the following environments:
| Name | Main Application URL | Django Admin URL | Backend API URL |
|---|---|---|---|
| Production | https://researchdashboard.admin.cam.ac.uk/ | https://researchdashboard.admin.cam.ac.uk/admin | https://researchdashboard.admin.cam.ac.uk/api/ |
| Staging | https://test.researchdashboard.admin.cam.ac.uk/ | https://test.researchdashboard.admin.cam.ac.uk/admin | https://test.researchdashboard.admin.cam.ac.uk/api/ |
The GCP console pages for managing the infrastructure of each component of the deployment are:
| Name | Main Application Hosting | Database |
|---|---|---|
| Production | Kubernetes Engine (Namespace: pidash-production) | GCP Cloud SQL (DB name: pidash-production) |
| Staging | Kubernetes Engine (Namespace: pidash-test) | GCP Cloud SQL (DB name: pidash-test) |
Source code¶
The source code for the Research Dashboard is spread over the following repositories:
| Repository | Description |
|---|---|
| Application Server | The source code for the main application server. |
| CUFS GMS Microservice | The source code for the micro-service querying CUFS grant management system data. |
| CHRIS Grant Contracts Microservice | The source code for the micro-service querying CHRIS contracts data. |
| CUFS Salary Commitments Calculator | The source code for a salaries commitments calculator for CUFS. |
| Staff oncost calculator | The source code for a python module to calculate total staff oncosts. |
| School Data Cache | The source code for caching of university school metadata. |
| Infrastructure Deployment | The Google Cloud Deployment Manager infrastructure code for deploying the application server to GCP |
Technologies used¶
The following gives an overview of the technologies the Research Dashboard is built on.
| Category | Language | Framework |
|---|---|---|
| Server | Python 3.7 | Django 2.2 |
| Client | JavaScript | jQuery v3.2.1 |
| Client | TypeScript | React 16.12 |
Operational documentation¶
The following gives an overview of how the Research Dashboard is deployed and maintained.
How and where the Self-Service Gateway is deployed¶
Database for application data is a PostgreSQL database hosted by GCP Cloud SQL. The main web application is a Django application, hosted by a GCP Kubernetes cluster.
Deploying a new release¶
The README.md file in the Infrastructure Deployment repository explains how to deploy the Research Dashboard.
Monitoring¶
The application emails errors to automation+pidash-production@uis.cam.ac.uk. More detailed logs can be found on the
GCP Console.
Debugging¶
See monitoring.
Administration¶
Any operational or administration issues should be raised as an issue in a repository for this purpose.
Service Management and tech lead¶
The service owner for the Research Dashboard is Dawn Edwards.
The service managers for the Research Dashboard are Abraham Martin and Will Russell.
The tech lead for the Research Dashboard is Mike Bamford.
The following engineers have operational experience with the Research Dashboard and are able to respond to support requests or incidents: