Dynamic Gauge Charts in Lightning Dashboards

Want to measure dynamically how you’re trending towards your business goals? Introducing Dynamic Gauge Charts in Lightning Dashboards! Gone are the days of adding static values to the segment ranges. Now you can leverage objects and fields from Salesforce for your gauge charts. So how do we do it? Let’s start by understanding the basic terminology.

Target: The maximum value in the chart.
Measure: The current status or performance as indicated by the pointer.
Segment Ranges: The ranges that show you how you’re trending towards your target.

Two Chart Modes

With the new dynamic gauge charts, two modes – standard and dynamic – are available for creating gauge charts.

Standard Mode

This is the same mode that you’re used to. You select the metric from the report as the measure and enter static target and segment ranges manually.

Dynamic Mode

By default in dynamic mode, the report metric is used as the chart measure and a field value is used as the target.

• Chart Measure: Select the report metric, which can be any top-level metric from the underlying report.
• Chart Target: Select the field value from a selected Salesforce object and record.

Note: If your measure value is lower than your target, you can always swap the two by clicking on the Swap button. This option is helpful for use cases where the report is a filtered version of the overall target.

Use Cases

Let’s see how the setup works in a couple of use cases.

Chart a subsidiary’s sales performance against the overall company’s performance goal.

1. First, create the underlying report. Here I’ve created an Accounts report for the ABC Designers corporation, which has subsidiaries in Peru and Singapore. Sum of ACV is the top level metric.

2. Next, I create a new Dashboard and add an Account Name filer so I can filter the dashboard for each of the two subsidiaries.
3. Now, I add a new Gauge Chart component. I select the underlying report and then go into Dynamic Mode.
4. In the Chart Measure section, I set the pointer value for the gauge chart. To pick up the ACV value for the selected subsidiary from the report, I select “Sum of ACV”.
5. In the Target section, I can select any Salesforce object, record, and field. In this case, I want to use the ACV value for the whole company, so I select Account as the object, ABC Designers Corp as the record, and ACV as the field.

6. My target segments are percentages.

7. Now I save the dashboard and that’s it! The visualized chart shows the ACV of the selected subsidiary of the ABC Designers Corp. account relative to the ACV for the entire company.

Let’s now look at two example results of the settings for the dynamic chart.

As a manager, you want to see how a rep is performing compared to the rest of your team

1. Create a report that shows the list of users who report to you and includes each user’s quota value.
2. Create a dashboard with a top-level filter that allows you to select individual users.
3. Add a dynamic gauge chart.
4. The chart measure is the Sum of Quota value from the underlying report.
5. For the target, select User as the object, “User running the Dashboard” for the record, and ACV for the field.
6. Save and display the dashboard.
7. Now when you filter the dashboard, you can see how each user is doing in comparison to your team’s set quota.

And that’s it, that’s how easy it is to create dynamic gauge charts in your Lightning Dashboards. Have a go in your own org, the feature is currently in Beta but aims to be GA in Spring ’22.

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