Optimizing a Charger Monitoring Platform with Retool

Akveo Retool developer redesigned a sluggish Retool-based charger monitoring platform into a fast, scalable, and secure multi-country dashboard, enabling operational efficiency and decentralized customization.

Retool
PostgreSQL
Optimizing a Charger Monitoring Platform with Retool

Industry overview

Company Overview

A European e-mobility infrastructure company operating in 11 countries, managing a large network of EV chargers and focused on sustainable transportation solutions. The company needed a better way to manage real-time charger data, user access, and issue reporting.

About the project

Challenges

  • Severe performance issues in the existing Retool app (1-minute+ load times)
  • Inability to manage data from multiple backend systems in real-time
  • Lack of granular access controls and poor scalability across multiple countries
  • Requirements

  • Improve load time and responsiveness of the app
  • Normalize and consolidate data from multiple sources
  • Implement granular permission control per country and user role
  • Allow country admins to customize their interfaces
  • Provide real-time charger stats and issue monitoring
  • Key Deliverables

  • Fully redesigned Retool app with caching and normalized database
  • Enhanced access control with permission-based queries
  • Modular country-level customization features
  • Interactive dashboards, ticketing system, and issue maps
  • Main tool
    Retool

    Additional tools
    Project Timeline
    5 months
    Element

    Akveo’s team, who was working on the project

    Dmitry Sitnik
    Dmitry Sitnik
    Head of Low-Code Department

    Client was unsatisfied with the performance of their Retool app, which freezes for a minute or more with each screen refresh. That was a consequence of getting multiple datasets on the front end to map the data.We designed and developed a Retool app that displays the stats of all the chargers across the network of 11 countries and works faster. The data comes from different systems, so we needed to introduce a cache DB on PostgreSQL that holds normalized data. This decision allowed us to join different tables from different sources on the fly with minimal delay, having complex calculations as well.Also, enhanced security and granular access control is done on the Retool Business plan.

    In additional, country admins are ready to co-develop their own apps and add links to them on the user left nav bar. This is done via a special app.

    Scope of Work

    User Permissions

    • Global admins can manage user permissions on per country basis
    • These permissions are enforced in each SQL query

    Ticket Templating System

    • To speed up ops work, we let users define their own country-specific tickets
    • These templates are displayed every time a user starts to add a ticket regarding a charger a
    • Tickets are created in Salesforce

    Issue Dashboard

    • App displays the number of issues for selected countries
    • Each counter also serves as a filter button, so when clicked, it filters the data in the table below accordingly
    • We display additional data in the expandable grid rows

    Issue Map

    • Issues can be displayed as a map in the main app, or users can open a special ‘Full-screen map’ app

    Country Menu

    • Country admins can create apps by their own, and we let them to control what menu items to be shown for their employees

    Tech stack

    Frontend

    • Retool

    Backend

    • Retool Workflows
    • PostgreSQL

    Results

    01

    Performance Boost

    Reduced screen refresh time from over a minute to under 5 seconds

    02

    Scalable Architecture

    Centralized, normalized database enables seamless scaling across countries

    03

    Enhanced User Autonomy

    Country admins can build and manage their own apps without central team involvement

    04

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