Infokus

Apps Script developers have consistently expressed the need to monitor the health of various Apps Script services. Additionally, at every forum, event, hackathon or hangout, we have heard you express a need to know and understand the quota limits in Apps Script.

Apps Script Dashboard is born!

We heard your message loud and clear, so we started working on a dashboard for Apps Script. Today, we are launching the Google Apps Script Dashboard. This experimental dashboard can be used to monitor the health of 10 major services. It also provides a detailed view into the quota restrictions in Apps Script.

Features of the Apps Script Dashboard

1. The dashboard offers a view into past and present states of 10 major Apps Script services. The past view goes back one week.
2. Each Apps Script service has three states on the dashboard: Normal Service, Known Issues and Investigating.
3. The Known Issues state signals that we know about the issues in that service and are working to fix them.
4. Quotas are displayed for three different types of user accounts: Consumer accounts (for example @gmail.com accounts), Google Apps (free) accounts, and Google Apps for Business, EDU and Government accounts.

Interesting Facts About Quotas

Did you know that consumer accounts (for example @gmail.com accounts) have quota of 1 hour of CPU time per day for executing triggers? Imagine the extent of automation that can happen for each user with triggers. And how about 20,000 calls to any external APIs. Now that packs in a lot of 3rd party integration with the likes of Salesforce.com, Flickr, Twitter and other APIs. So, if you are thinking of building extensions in Google Apps for your product, then don’t forget to leverage the UrlFetch Service which has OAuth built-in. Event managers can create 5,000 calendar events per day and SQL aficionados get 10,000 JDBC calls a day.

Check out the Dashboard for more.

Saurabh Gupta profile | twitter | blog Saurabh is a Developer Programs Engineer at Google. He works closely with Google Apps Script developers to help them extend Google Apps. Over the last 10 years, he has worked in the financial services industry in different roles. His current mission is to bring automation and collaboration to Google Apps users.

Editor’s Note: Guest author Romain Vialard works at Revevol, an international service provider dedicated to Google Apps and other Cloud solutions. -- Jan Kleinert

In a previous post, Improving Revevol’s Productivity with Google Apps Script, we demonstrated how Apps Script helped us handle a lot of training requests. For any given client, using tools we built with Google Apps Script, we are able to quickly find the perfect trainer depending on variables like the date, the place, the language and the training scope. To ensure that the training we do meets a consistent quality bar, we send a survey to all the participants at the end of the training. This post discusses how we use Google Apps to conduct these surveys to glean insight into the quality of our training.

We started our survey project by using simple Google Forms to poll our users. Each form creates a spreadsheet per language, each with thousands of submissions. From this data, we need to create visualizations to quickly make sense of all the information we gather. We want our international clients to each be presented with a unique dashboard for trainings in all their subsidiaries, our change managers to be able to see the results of any specific training to be sure that everything went well, and our trainers to see only the data they need.

We used Apps Script to tie all the pieces together to fulfill these requirements. We created a translation table in a spreadsheet to automate the translation of each survey, and persist the results using JSON two-dimensional arrays in a spreadsheet cell. Using this data, we present a web based front-end to show several charts and bring controls to filter the data in many ways. Each client is provided with a special access key that allows them to view the dashboards relevant to their organization. Clients log in via their existing Google Accounts, and the application presents and enforces appropriate access control rights that are depending upon their role in the organization.

With the recent addition of libraries in Apps Script, we were able to build this dashboard in a very short amount of time using a few of the notable script libraries linked to from the Apps Script documentation.

With ArrayLib’s method filterByText(data, columnIndex, value), we are able to implement filtering to enforce access controls by role:

if (e.parameter.selectedTrainer != All && 
    e.parameter.selectedTrainer != undefined)
  data = ArrayLib.filterByText(data, 
                               1, 
                               e.parameter.selectedTrainer);
if (e.parameter.selectedClient != All && 
    e.parameter.selectedClient != undefined)
  data = ArrayLib.filterByText(data, 
                               2, 
                               e.parameter.selectedClient.split(,));

With PivotChartsLib, we can create charts based on our survey results in only a few lines of code:

var grid = app.createGrid(3, 2);
var chart = PivotChartsLib.createColumnChart(data, 10);
grid.setWidget(0, 0, chart);
var chart = PivotChartsLib.createPieChart(data, 9);
grid.setWidget(0, 1, chart);
var chart = PivotChartsLib.createColumnChart(data, 6);
grid.setWidget(1, 0, chart);

Apps Script is all about Google Apps. Applications running on Apps Script handle authentication as well as integrating seamlessly with spreadsheets as well as other parts of Google Apps. With Apps Script, we have a powerful tool to tie together all of the more general services from Google Apps and build rich, domain specific applications for our clients.

Romain Vialard   profile | YouTube Romain Vialard is a Google Apps Change Management consultant at Revevol. Romain writes scripts to automate everyday tasks, add functionality and facilitate rapid adoption of cutting edge web infrastructures. As a Google Apps Script Top Contributor, he has also built many of the top scripts in the Apps Script Gallery, including the very popular Gmail Meter.