Ohm Analytics: Building an analytics platform for the solar industry
Type
Web Application
Client
Ohm Analytics
Services
Strategy, UI/UX Design,
Web Application Development,
Database Optimization,
Solr Search
An analytics platform built for solar installers and businesses across the United States and Canada.
The Problem: The project involved a large volume of data, complex ETL pipelines, and rich visualizations. The real challenge was connecting all of these pieces into something genuinely useful for customers in the solar industry — not just displaying data, but making it actionable.
The Solution: We architected a platform that lets users quickly view data and visualizations and search across large datasets with minimal delay. We built the ecosystem around a curated set of open-source frameworks and tools, with Apache Solr powering fast search — one of the platform's most heavily used features — alongside several other supporting technologies.
The Outcome: The result is a robust, reliable platform that runs smoothly with minimal friction. Customers can explore their data and generate or download monthly reports to support their own research and decision-making.
Business Challenge
At its core, OhmAnalytics' business is about turning raw data into something meaningful. That means ingesting large volumes of data, filtering it intelligently, and presenting it to customers in a way that supports real business decisions.
Big data, however, is never simple to manage — especially when the goal is a smooth, intuitive user experience. By combining a set of proven, reliable open-source tools and technologies, we were able to solve this core pain point and deliver a platform customers could depend on.
Project Objectives
- Eliminate manual report generation
- Deliver a real-time search engine
- Meet industry-standard security requirements
- Reduce infrastructure costs
- Provide API access for customer integrations
Solution
Our Discovery Process
OhmAnalytics started as a WordPress-based platform and grew into a much larger system over time. Because of that, our requirements process evolved right alongside the product. Throughout, we prioritized flexibility — building in a way that made it easy to add new features down the line without locking the client into any single vendor or technology.
Why Open-Source Tools and Frameworks
We believe strongly in protecting our clients' long-term interests, which means avoiding tools and technologies that could leave them locked in or dependent on a single vendor. Open-source solutions keep knowledge transfer fast and straightforward when needed, and they also give clients access to a much wider talent pool — since skilled developers for these tools and technologies are easier to find in the market.
Performance Optimizations
Performance was a critical part of this project. We used Redis, queuing systems, lazy loading, and reusable components to keep the platform fast and to make it easy to ship new features quickly within the existing system.
The quality of IviveLabs work and approach to the project genuinely exceeded my expectations.
Lessons Learned
This project pushed us to explore a number of technical edge cases that are surprisingly undocumented. Report generation with embedded graphs, for instance, sounds simple on paper but turned out to be technically complex — largely due to the limitations of headless browsers. We worked through this by testing and switching between several different graphing libraries.
One takeaway for anyone tackling something similar: avoid using SVG for automated PDF report generation through headless browsers.
What We Would Do Differently Today
Since this platform evolved gradually over time, if we were building it from scratch today, we'd lean much more heavily on machine learning and AI throughout the project.
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