Many developers spend significant amounts of time and effort building custom internal tools and dashboards for their organizations' needs. These internal tools can be time-consuming, error-prone, and challenging to execute and maintain manually.
Internal tooling platforms enable engineers to create internal dashboards and operations within minutes. These platforms significantly reduce developer time spent on building internal tooling. Specifically for internal UIs, these platforms empower non-technical users to view, edit, and update information securely. Engineers are no longer the bottleneck and can focus on customer-facing activities.
Airplane is a developer-first internal tooling platform that allows engineers to quickly build powerful workflows and UIs using scripts, queries, and more. Airplane Views is a React-based platform that allows users to build powerful UIs within minutes to increase visibility into their internal processes. From database management to customer support, Airplane Views provides you with powerful tools to develop robust and complex internal dashboards within minutes using code.
In this article, we'll cover the benefits of using Airplane Views for your internal tooling needs and the most common use cases we see organizations using Airplane Views for.
Benefits of using Airplane Views
- Extensive library of pre-built components - Airplane has an extensive library of pre-built, React-based components that can be used to build robust views rapidly. These include items such as buttons, callouts, icons, images, and more. This library makes it easy for developers to create complex UIs efficiently.
- Easy-to-use templates - Airplane's out-of-the-box templates make it easy for teams to build internal UIs for their specific needs. These templates range from admin panels to support dashboards. It's simple to clone a template using Airplane's CLI, customize it to fit your needs, and deploy it to the Airplane app.
- Code-first approach - Airplane's code-first approach gives users maximum flexibility to customize their dashboards as they see fit. Users can also integrate their views code into their codebase, making it easy to version control, test, modify, and more.
- Clean design - Airplane's clean and intuitive UI makes it easy for developers to find and utilize pre-built components and features in their dashboards. The UI also makes it simple for non-technical users to navigate internal dashboards in Airplane. These users can directly view, update and modify data within dashboards securely without additional technical help.
Top Views use cases
Organizations build internal dashboards for many reasons, from customer support to database management. Companies most commonly use Airplane Views for the following cases:
- Admin panel
- Customer support
- Customer insights and analytics
- Stripe refunds
- Feature flags
- GitHub pull request ("PR") management
- Database management
Admin panel
Airplane users build robust admin panels that showcase a centralized, detailed view of their customer base. Customer-facing teams, such as sales and support teams, can utilize this dashboard to manage their customers effectively and ensure all of their information is up to date. These items include editing contact information, looking up customers, updating addresses, and more. Customer admin panels empower non-technical teams to directly edit information securely, removing engineering bottlenecks.
If this use case seems like a good fit for your organization, check out our admin panel template to get started.
Customer support
Many companies use Airplane for their support processes and tickets. Support teams can use Airplane Views to manage all of their customer support interactions in one place. Users gain visibility into customer support conversations, the length of time a ticket has been open, the priority level of an issue, and more. Teams can also assign open tickets to support members. This allows support teams to directly manage their customer interactions without relying on technical team members.
To build a customer support dashboard in minutes, get started with the support ticket dashboard template.
Customer insights and analytics
Airplane Views makes it easy for users to visualize and analyze important data. Many organizations build customer insights dashboards in Airplane to track customer and product data visually using line charts, bar graphs, and more. Customer and product teams typically use this view to understand weekly customer trends, popularity of different products, order frequency, and more. This dashboard provides impactful insights that influence decision-making for customer-facing teams.
If you're looking to build a customer insights dashboard for your customer-facing teams, check out the customer insights dashboard template to get started.
Stripe refunds
Airplane allows organizations to build internal dashboards that provide visibility into customer charges. For example, billing teams use this dashboard to search for customers in their database, view orders, and issue refunds in one centralized view. This streamlines the refund process and removes the burden on engineers who otherwise would run refund operations manually.
If you're looking to build a Stripe billing dashboard for your organization, check out our Stripe billing template.
Feature flagging
Another common Airplane Views dashboard is the feature flagging dashboard. This dashboard allows users to view feature settings by customer, edit existing features, create new features, and enable or disable features. By using this dashboard, SREs, product teams, and developers can quickly conduct A/B testing, toggle features on and off for certain customers, and see which features are enabled for certain users in one centralized view, making it easy to track and update.
With Airplane, managing feature flags is efficient and easy. To get started, check out the feature flagging dashboard template.
GitHub pull request ("PR") management
GitHub PR dashboards are also popular among companies using Airplane. This dashboard provides a centralized view of all PRs in one place. Team members can search for users, view open PRs, approve PRs, and see which PRs need to be reviewed. By using this dashboard, users can gain better visibility into proposed changes to a repository and can collaborate more effectively with their team members.
Check out the GitHub PR dashboard template to get started.
Database management
Another common use case among Airplane users is a database management dashboard. Companies use this view to monitor their database in real-time and ensure issues are identified and fixed promptly. Users can track database performance and metrics, such as cache hit ratio, number of connections, database size, and more, to ensure the optimal health of their databases. This minimizes disruptions to their internal operations and ensures that their databases are running smoothly.
Conclusion
Engineers spend enormous amounts of time building one-off internal operations and UIs in-house to address the needs of their teams. Utilizing a powerful platform, like Airplane, can save engineers significant amounts of time and eliminate technical bottlenecks.
Using Airplane Views, developers can quickly build sophisticated UIs for their teams' needs. This article covered the most common use cases for Airplane Views, ranging from customer admin panels to feature flagging dashboards. If you'd like to learn more about building internal UIs, check out our blog for content such as React JS tutorial, building an admin dashboard using ngx-admin, building a dashboard using AdminLTE, and more.
To try Airplane out and build your first UI in under 15 minutes, sign up for a free account or request a demo.
