Exploring data
Real insights come from data you can touch, not just see. Nicely formatted dashboards are fine, but the ability to drill down into the information to surface patterns, context, and relationships is priceless.
This article explains how to get the most from your data in SquaredUp, introduces the Data Explorer and demonstrate how you can transform static dashboards into operationally intelligent perspectives.
Connecting your data
SquaredUp is designed to make sense of your data from the ground up. It's built on top of a powerful knowledge graph, a type of database designed to store objects and the connections between them.
This matters because modern environments aren’t flat lists of resources. They’re dynamic systems, where a single application might depend on dozens of microservices or infrastructure components.
A traditional dashboard can show you slices of that complexity, but a knowledge graph helps SquaredUp reveal the bigger picture: how objects interact, where dependencies exist, and how issues propagate.
How to explore data
Having a mesh of interconnected data is all well and good, but how do you actually interact with it? Simply put, SquaredUp leverages this architecture to give you the ability to drill down into objects. This in turn enables SquaredUp's exploration features such as the Map, Data Explorer, and Perspectives.
Drilldown
Drilldown is the name given to your ability to drill down into objects in SquaredUp. Whenever you navigate from a workspace, to a dashboard, to an object, to a perspective—that's drilldown. It's a simple concept, powered by smart architecture.
But it's the power this feature unlocks where the magic really shines, and that's where perspectives come in.
Map
The Map provides a dynamic, interactive model of your entire environment, giving you a clear visual representation of the objects within it and how they relate to one another.
It's composed from everything you create in SquaredUp, bringing your workspaces, dashboards, tiles, and all the objects indexed from your connected data source into a unified view. This creates a fast, effective, and interactive way to grasp the structure of your environment.
Each of your object’s status, health, and connections are displayed in real time, allowing you to immediately understand the dependency chain and how different components interact.
By transforming the otherwise abstract architecture of your systems into an explorable model, the Map allows you to move through your environment as if it were a physical space.
Navigating this space makes it much easier to identify patterns, understand dependencies, and quickly spot areas where issues may be forming; long before they escalate.
Accessing the map
You can access the map in three places:
- The Map tab within in a workspace
- A Workspace overview
- An object drilldown
Accessing the map from the two locations displays an expansion of the current workspace, showing the dashboards it contains.
Accessing the map from an object drilldown shows the corresponding object and any objects it is connected to.
Although these are different starting points, the map forms a singular connected space that can be explored. This means that it is possible to view data source objects by starting in a workspace map and vice versa.
Data Explorer
The Data Explorer allows you to experiment with all your data streams and objects in one place, without the need to create or edit a dashboard. This feature functions identically to the tile editor, and is the perfect way to test out creating visualizations without worrying about overwriting a tile.
See Data Explorer for more.
The Data Explorer can be accessed by:
- Selecting Data from the left-hand nav
- Clicking more options on a tile then selecting Explore
Perspectives
Perspectives are a type of dashboard that gets automatically generated whenever you drill down into an object that is being used as a dashboard variable. When you click on one of these objects (whether it’s a server, application, or KPI), the perspective engine finds all the relevant dashboards scattered across your organization and brings them into one view.
From the perspective view, you can easily navigate between each of the locations where an object is used, solving the issue of dashboard sprawl. You can also view the Object Details, for an overview of the object properties, the data streams it's returned from and its position in the Map.
Next steps
That concludes the final step in the First Steps series. You're now ready to get out there and start building some dashboards!
Bear in mind that while we've covered the foundations of using SquaredUp, there are many many features still left to learn about. When you're ready, here's a few features to get you started with leveling-up your dashboarding skills:
- SQL Analytics: Carry out advanced manipulation of data using a SQL queries.
- Expressions: Manipulate and format your data any way you see fit.
- Scripts: Implement custom logic for handling edge cases that aren't covered by the standard product functionality.