Data Streams

What is a Data Stream?

A data stream brings you data to answer a specific question like "What's the health state of the objects?", "What kind of alerts are coming from this plugin for my servers?", "What's the average memory usage of this app?"

The magic of data streams is that they standardize data from all the different shapes and formats your tools use into a straightforward tabular format. While creating a tile you can tweak data streams by grouping or aggregating specific columns. Depending on the kind of data, SquaredUp will automatically suggest how to visualize the result, for example as a table or line graph.

How do I get Data Streams?

• Pre-configured data streams - some plugins come with pre-configured data streams that are imported when you add the plugin.

• Configurable data streams - some plugins allow you to create new data streams using a form.

  • A configurable data stream allows you to easily create new data streams specific to your needs, by entering information into a form, such as metric names or queries. Configurable data streams have a + before the name, and once new data streams have been created they show in the normal list of data streams.

    Any data streams you create can be edited from Settings > Data Streams.

• Advanced users can also write their own custom data streams (or edit a data stream created from a configurable data stream) see Custom Data Streams.

Using Data Streams

When adding or editing a tile on a dashboard you need to configure a scope, data stream and visualization. See Dashboards

Select the data stream that answers the question you have about the objects in the scope.

Which data streams are offered to you depends on the objects in the scope. Every object has been imported from a plugin, together with data streams that make sense for those objects. If you pick a scope that contains objects from different plugins you'll see all data streams from those plugins. If you pick a scope with objects that came from a plugin without data streams you'll only see the pre-installed data streams that are always available in SquaredUp, even if you never imported any data streams.

Data Stream Advanced Settings

Advanced settings for each data stream can be found by clicking Configure next to the data stream name.

Filtering

Data shown can be filtered according to whether data in a column equals or does not equal a specified text or numerical value. Dates can be filtered by Before now or After now, for example to show overdue orders. Text matching is case sensitive.

Group by

You can group and aggregate data by column.

For example, you might Group byservice, choose to Aggregate columnamount with Aggregation typeTotal, to show a table of cost per service.

Which columns are available depends on the data stream you chose.

Configuring grouping will enable different visualizations to be displayed, such as bar chart and donut. For example, grouping tickets by channel will allow you to show a donut of how many tickets were logged by email vs web form.

Sorting

Data can be sorted by column in ascending or descending order. This sets the default sort order, but users can click on a column heading to sort data in a table on the fly.

Ticking Top and typing a number will show the top n rows of data.