Banana Dashboards

Dashboards are Fusion’s built-in analytics component. Most of the components of dashboards, called panels, are for data visualization. Some panels display textual information; for example, records in a table or documents.

Dashboards permit near-real-time views of data. For some types of panels, you can configure how frequently the panel gets new data.

Dashboards also permit users to interact with data. For example, users can submit queries, select facets, and zoom in and out on histograms.

A Fusion dashboard contains one or more controls for search query inputs and one or more quantitive displays over the results for that query.

Dashboards run as a client-side application in a web browser, using JavaScript components for HTML5. Client-side JavaScript provides a dynamic, responsive browsing experience. Solr facets provide the quantifications required for visualizations, for example, charts, graphs, tables, and maps (for geospatial data). Dashboards can also have tabular displays for drilling down to the individual documents in a results set.

The underlying browser application is Banana, an open-source visualization tool based on Kibana 3. Where Kibana communicates with Elasticsearch, Banana communicates with Solr. Banana can be downloaded from: https://github.com/LucidWorks/banana/.

Fusion dashboards were first developed for log file analysis. Log file entries contain a timestamp plus some amount of additional event information. Fusion’s date/time processing aggregates these timestamps at different levels of granularity allowing for visualization of historical trends in system and user behaviors.

See these additional topics for details: