While Redash provides a fistful of features and available data sources/visualizations/dashboard layouts/alerts out of the box, it's not always enough to fulfill the needs of all of your users.

Data sources are very dynamic, and it won't be a mistake to note that you can definitely expect at least one/two totally new and not widely known data sources to become mainstream per year.

The same goes for alert destinations. For example, one day an email alert is enough, but as your company expands in new directions, you want Slack or Mattermost, or maybe Skype integration.

Your department manager is happy with the current dashboard layout and visualization type, but tomorrow you get a bigger screen to display your dashboards on, and all of a sudden you need a flower-shaped chart visualization.

If you use one of the closed source legacy dashboarding tools, you might have to wait until your newly requested features make their way to the product manager of that tool, and then probably for several development/QA cycles until it propagates to public release.

At this point, one of the main benefits of Redash is the fact that Redash is open source, and you can tailor it to meet your own needs by yourself.

In the following sections, we will cover options regarding extending Redash beyond the basics that came with it out of the box.

In this chapter, we will be covering the following topics:

• Redash API
• API calls overview
• API usage examples
• Extending Redash code