Data streams
Data streams standardize data from all the different shapes and formats your tools use and return it in a straightforward table format.
Each plugin comes with a selection of its own data streams, which you select as the entry point to your data source objects when editing a tile or exploring data.
Data streams can also be created from Tile data scripts.
Types of data streams
When selecting a data stream to fetch data from, there are two types you'll encounter, global and scoped:
- Global: These return information of a general nature (as such Objects tab of the tile editor is disabled for this type). For example, the Azure
Sentinel Alerts
data stream simply returns a list with details of all your Microsoft sentinel alerts. - Scoped: Allow you to specify which objects / collections to pull data from on the Objects tab of the tile editor. For example, the Azure
Alerts
data stream lets you specify differentHost
s orResource Group
s.
Similarly, data streams are also differentiated by their configuration type:
- Pre-configured: Some plugins come with pre-configured data streams that are indexed when you add the data source (s such Parameters tab of the tile editor is disabled for this type).
- Configurable: Some data streams allow you to configure settings for the data returned by the plugin on the Parameters tab of the tile editor.
- Custom (Advanced): You can also write your own custom data streams (or edit a data stream created from a configurable data stream) see Custom Data Streams.
Using data streams
Whether editing a tile or exploring data, visualizing your data always begins on the Data stream tab of the tile editor.
Many data streams related to each other as pre-configurations of an encompassing data stream.
For example, the Workflow Runs / In Progress Worklows
data stream is a pre-configuration of the Workflow Runs
data stream, where the Status parameter has automatically been pre-selected.
To reflect this, pre-configured data streams follow the naming convention of <Primary data stream> / <pre-configuration>
.
Data stream parameters
If the data stream is configurable, you can then configure any optional / mandatory settings on the Parameters tab.
Depending on the data stream this configuration can be mandatory (such as when specifying a search query) or it could be optional (such as choosing whether to return top n results).
For help with configuring the data streams specific to your data source, refer to the corresponding data source article:
List of documentation for data source plugins available
Data configuration
If a data stream is scoped, after selecting it you can select which objects or collection to fetch data from on the Objects tab.
You change optionally format the data type for each of the columns in the data data on the Columns tab. This is useful if you expected a value to be returned as a number but it has a Type of String, or if you need to specify a custom date format.
The Shaping tab of the tile editor lets you filter, group and sort the data from your data streams.
For detailed instructions on using the tile editor to configure data see Data Tiles.
Visualization
Depending on the kind of data returned by the data stream, SquaredUp automatically suggests how to visualize the result (for example, as a table or line graph).
For detailed instructions on creating visualizations, see Visualization Settings.