Several data architectures exist to process and store high volumes of streaming data, human or machine generated. However, when it's time to embed streaming visual analytics within your data products and enterprise applications, the options are few if any.
Some data visualization tools allow the replay and animation of data so long as all data is in the browser, limiting the solution to a few thousand rows. On the other hand, BI products that offer this functionality have the following issues:
Due to their monolithic design, visualizing live streaming data and replaying historical data is not available as components that can be easily embedded in your own web applications.
Even when using their user interface, playing live data and replaying historical time windows is clunky and not as easy as it should be.
Due to outdated architectures, their streaming visual analytics solutions need hardware with high memory requirements to work properly. This is in addition to the underlying data engine. Even after complying with their system requirements, these BI servers can go down, which requires more servers for fault tolerant deployments. This infrastructure cost, together with administration costs, can significantly impact the total cost of your product, without mentioning licensing costs
The solution
To address these issues, ChartFactor recently introduced what in our opinion is the most powerful and advanced solution to visualize data in motion. It enables users to analyze live data, replay historical data, and interact with visualizations as new data is arriving. Data playing speed, between other settings, is easily configurable through UI and code. On the usability side, the ChartFactor time slider component is easily zoomable so that users can zoom-in to precisely select any time window or zoom-out to view the full timeline no matter how big. And its absolute and relative time pickers in addition to editable presets provide the most comfort for all types of users.
And true to ChartFactor’s core values, this functionality is easily embeddable in your own data products as well as available in ChartFactor Studio where you can add it to your existing dashboards. Because of ChartFactor Studio's transparent code approach, you can easily view and edit the code so that embedding this functionality in your data applications is no mystery.
The following video shows ChartFactor components visualizing streaming data and replaying historical data, within CharFactor Studio and also embedded within a custom web application.
Conclusion
In summary, ChartFactor’s fresh innovative lightweight architecture allows you to visualize streaming data and replay historical data straight from your applications without long implementation cycles, crazy hardware requirements or additional cloud service charges.
For more information on advanced data applications and ChartFactor, visit us at https://www.aktiun.com/chartfactor.