Hey! What happened to SAS Event Stream Processing Streamviewer? Can I still visualize IoT data?
Internet of Things (IoT) applications provide new capabilities and benefits that are only limited by our imaginations. For years, SAS and our customers have been extending the limits of what is possible with IoT. SAS Event Stream Processing is a part of the IoT landscape that many use to build new applications that exploit streaming data.
Data dependencies, innovation, experimentation, trying new things are part of bringing businesses into the age of the streaming and connected world of today. Building and testing prototype IoT projects now occurs with increasing frequency. One piece of the analytical toolkit has always been the ability to visualize the stream of data as it flows through the phases of a project. This is where SAS Event Stream Processing Streamviewer fits the bill in my experience.
As of Release 2024.07, SAS Event Stream Processing Streamviewer was no longer supported. Users were instead encouraged to explore the SAS Event Stream Processing Data Source Plug-in for Grafana as a replacement. I don’t know about you, but with changes like this, sometimes it helps to have someone share a few pointers to get started with the transition.
Grafana may be familiar to you as a tool for visualizing logs and traces such as those produced by Kubernetes environments providing alerts to system administrators. Well, we have integrated it into SAS Event Stream Processing as a visualization tool you can use for testing new projects developed in SAS Event Stream Processing Studio.
As you can guess, I happen to be a fan of the now-discontinued Streamviewer when creating new IoT projects with SAS Event Stream Processing. Streamviewer provided a graphic interface you could use to make sure the data flowing through a project matched your expectations as any data transformations, computer vision detection and other advanced analytics were applied. The documentation says that the use of the Grafana plugin is not intended for monitoring IoT projects, but I still find it useful for validating data in new projects. There’s nothing wrong with having a little fun when working on projects and gaining new insights.
There is a nice communities post that mentions Grafana as part of a computer vision project. You can check out this example that mentions the plugin. The post also describes the recent SAS Event Stream Processing project package organization structure that makes it so easy to work with SAS Event Stream Processing projects in a Kubernetes environment without having to separately worry about keeping track of your data in persistent volumes PV and persistent volume claims PVC.
In this post, I’ll show you a few steps of how to add a Grafana dashboard to easily show the current location of the International Space Station (ISS) in real time with a geomap. To recreate the results shown in this post, you must have SAS Event Stream Processing release 2022.07 or later and the Grafana plugin correctly installed on your environment, which is a straightforward task for an experienced systems administrator these days.
For this example, I presume that you have some familiarity with SAS Event Stream Processing Studio, but if you don’t, that’s ok since by continuing to read, you will gain some intuition on SAS Event Stream Processing.
I have a completed SAS Event Stream Processing Studio project saved on my ESP Server. This project has three source windows, one of which makes the connection to the streaming data source having the latitude and longitude coordinates of where the International Space Station is in real-time. The source window uses a SAS Event Stream Processing URL Connector to access an API that returns the location information in JSON format. The name of the source window is “iss”, and this name will be used later in the dashboard.
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I run the SAS Event Stream Processing project in test mode to confirm that I am receiving data from the API. This screen shows that the iss project window is receiving streaming data from the space station. (Note: If you want to run this project in Grafana in your environment, be sure to change the output schema for the ISS source window so that the datetime is set to Type: stamp and not date.)
You can get to Grafana from SAS Viya in the Streaming Analytics application section: Welcome Experience page. (If you are not running release Stable 2024.11 or later, the choice is visible after you first enter one of the Streaming Analytics applications.)
In Grafana, the SAS Event Stream Processing plugin in my environment has been installed and configured with a data source that connects to the SAS Event Stream Processing application. There is a “Build a dashboard” button on this window.
I add a visualization to the new dashboard.
The sasesp-plugin connects to the ESP Server and can access any of the running public projects and any other projects that I have been granted authorization to. To start the dashboard, I use the plugin to find and connect to the running project and then make some selections deciding whether I want to see a table of the data fields, or some other visualization. Multiple visualizations can be added to a single dashboard.
I just had to select the right data source fields at the bottom of the screen to reference the “iss” project and SAS Event Stream Processing window I am interested in viewing. I changed the default Time series view to Geomap and set a few of the listed properties to reference the latitude and longitude fields in the running SAS Event Stream Processing project. I selected location mode > Coords and then added the lat and long fields to the properties panel. I then clicked Apply and Save to add this visualization to the new dashboard.
Here is the Geomap. At the time of writing this post, the space station was heading into the Gulf of Mexico and over the eastern seaboard of the United States.
The SAS Event Stream Processing plugin is easy to use when testing SAS Event Stream Processing projects, and now that I have worked with it for a while, I’m pleased to say that for those of you that liked working with Streamviewer, I can recommend the plugin as a worthwhile replacement.
For anyone interested in trying out this ISS project in your own SAS Event Stream Processing environment, you can get all the details and download a copy of the project from GitHub. This project has more illustrations of SAS Event Stream Processing capabilities and is a good project to run to get some practice with the application. Also, check out this Communities article on Tracking the International Space Station.
Thanks for reading!
Don’t forget that you can always reach out to your local SAS Representative to ask about using your Education Training points to arrange for private online mentoring sessions on SAS Event Stream Processing or any other SAS initiative you are working on.
And remember, with SAS Event Stream Processing the sky’s the limit! 😊
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