The workflow before
Quext's smart locks, thermostats, leak sensors and access points generate millions of events a day across multifamily communities. Batch pipelines refreshed dashboards every 15 to 30 minutes, critical alerts took 10 to 15 minutes to arrive, and pipelines ran at about 92% uptime with failures fixed by hand. At the same time Quext was rewriting its monolithic property management application into microservices, and each new service needed reporting on day one without slowing development.
What we built
We moved device events onto Kafka (fed through API Gateway and Kinesis) so dashboards and alerts update as events arrive. A Cube.dev semantic layer defines each metric once, such as device uptime, maintenance response time, energy efficiency and cost per unit, and serves it with caching and row-level security to role-based dashboards for property managers, portfolio owners and maintenance staff.
Behind it, Airflow orchestrates dbt models with schema, freshness and completeness checks, landing data in Amazon Redshift for analytics, PostgreSQL for operational data and Snowflake for data sharing. Pipeline health, quality scorecards and failure alerts are visible to the team.
For the microservices rewrite we used a smaller application, Digital Human, as a low-risk pilot: we built its dimensional model and data marts on Redshift and QuickSight, evaluated Apache Superset for embedded dashboards, and turned the result into a checklist and target schemas that developers build each new service toward.
Before and after
| Measure | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Dashboard refresh | 15 to 30 minutes | Under 5 seconds |
| Critical alert delivery | 10 to 15 minutes | Under 30 seconds |
| Data pipeline uptime | About 92% | 99.5% |
| Shipping a new metric | 2 to 3 weeks | 2 to 3 days |
What's next
With one governed metric layer over device, energy and operations data, the next step is Level 2: letting property managers ask questions of their portfolio data in plain English, and using the same history for predictive maintenance.
