Getting started with IRIS+ Insights
IRIS+ Insights is a brand new module that Irisity offers for customers looking to have a more curated insight into the trends and statistics from their monitoring sites.
The Insights module is a new module that offers customers a perspective across the detectable activities that occur at their sites. These data sets are taken from occurrences triggered in the past, and collected to allow customers the opportunity to splice the data to their desired visualization preferences.
The Insights module contains these primary functions
- Create and personalize your own dashboards
- View and make sense of a dashboards
View an Insights dashboard
Each account will have a default Insights dashboard, created by us to give you an opportunity to play and interact with a dashboard for the first time. This is great for customers who are new to BI tools and perfect for those who wish to learn how they can take advantage of data visualization tools.
To start, locate the Insights tab in your account. If you do not have access to one, contact your sysadmin or Irisity customer support to learn more.
In this Insights tab, you will see a default Insights dashboard that has already been created:
This dashboard can be customized and manipulated to any degree, providing flexibility for those learning the functions for the first time.
For those that have created a new dashboard, you can access a saved dashboard by clicking on the Open dashboard button at the top of the dashboard options. This opens a menu list of existing dashboards you can load.
Create your own dashboard
The Insights module can offer quick an easy visualization functions to help you get a dashboard up and running without any hassle. The most basic visualization options the module offers are:
- Creating an aggregation of data over time in a graph
- Creating a count in a panel that updates every couple of minutes
- Creating columns of fields of interest
To create a new dashboard, click on the button +Create a new dashboard.
This will prompt you to create a new dashboard by giving it a name followed by an initial data source to connect the dashboard to.
Today, we offer the following types of data sources to connect with your dashboards:
- Crowd statistics rules
- People counting rules
- Traffic statistics rules
- Health events
- Events / Alarms
These data sources are derived from all histories of events and statistical that has occurred in from your cameras and devices within the past 30 days.
To properly generate data in the dashboards, it is recommended that you select a data source with cameras configured with the same statistics or events for at least a minute.
You can connect your dashboard to more data sources from this list after its creation.
Basic visualization options
Start by clicking on Edit dashboard after creating a new dashboard.
Be sure to click Save after you have selected 10 or less cameras in the camera tree. Once this is done, click on Edit dashboard to open up the edit mode.
In the example above, you can see that we have selected all the dashboards under the folder "Statistics".
You should also now see options on the left filled with different visualization options. The most common options we offer are
- Graph
- Grid
- Sum
- Count panel
- Pie chart
- Scatter chart
Other miscellaneous options include
- Uploading an image
- Adding text boxes
In the values section: Click Add Values
- This will open up dialogue to select and available value type. This value type is dependent to the data source(s) you have selected or added to your dashboard.
In this example, the data source containing event information has been selected, because in my case I want to see the count of all events that have occurred across time.
- As an argument field, we will now select the argument as camera, because we would like to see the different numbers of events that occurred between different cameras overtime.
- To visualize metric over time, you will also need to set at least the argument field to start time, and specify showing the trend per specific time interval
Once you have applied the argument field, you will now see your first panel populated with the value and fields configured across a duration of time:
To add a new panel in the same dashboard, simply click on another visualization option and the dashboard will automatically place and size the blank panel in the same view, running through the same exercise we just did.
But what if you want to add another data source in the same view?
This can be achieved by opening the additional menu options:
This access the additional options for dashboard configurations, including the option to add an additional data source to a single dashboard.
You can do so by locating the data source options under Data source:
Simply click on the Add action to open up all available data sources to select.
Once selected, you should be able to see that you have successfully added multiple data sources here:
If you're not sure as to what fields are available from a specific data source, you can always check the fields view on the right of the selected data source list.
Go back to the panel you want to configure with different data source and select the one you want to add to the panel:
Here, you can see that clicking on the data sources will allow you to assign a different data source for the selected panel. Setting this panel to show a different data source will not change the data source of the other panels, which allows for users to see visualizations from multiple data sources without changing or creating a new dashboard.
Managing a dashboard's layout is very simple. All you will need to do in the edit mode is to drag and drop each panel by selecting each panel at a time and moving them around the dasbboard:
Dropping them in the screen will automatically scale the panel to fill the page
Advanced visualization options
For customers looking for additional dashboard options, the Insights tab offers different ways to provide advanced visualizations to your alarm data:
Adding conditional formatting to panels
For customers looking to have add some automation to their panels' visuals, you can also include conditional formatting in the dashboard
First, access an existing panel you have and open up the additional options in the binding of your choice. Then, locate the conditional formatting option.
In the conditional formatting option, create a new formatting option by clicking on the + (Add) button. This will open up the different options you can select to apply the formatting to. In this pop out you will specify:
- The field you want to apply the formatting to
- The value type you want the format to apply against
- The condition that the field will have to fall under in order to trigger the formatting
In this example, we will apply a condition to all sites that exceed 100 events or more in a certain time period
Once that has been set, you should now see that the conditional formatting has only applied to the fields that falls within the set criteria.
Before conditional formatting
After conditional formatting
Adding a color scheme to a panel
To add custom colors to panels, you can access the options of an existing panel.
Make sure to turn the measure coloring off to enable custom colors
Once you have done so, access the color scheme option and click on the pencil icon to change the colors.
The same can be done in some others that shows visualizations, like the pie chart for example.