Represent your Data and Analytics Better with Graphite and Cassandra

In business presentations or data analytics report, representation is very important. Having fancy tools or add-ons is of no use, unless it gives you the right output. Data representation is better when you present it with the right tools. Graphite and Cassandra are two of the best tools for representing data and analytics. Let us find out how.

Graphite for Data Representation

Graphite widely known as an enterprise-ready monitoring tool is used by organizations primarily to store, retrieve, share, and visualize time-series data. It is also used to check the performance of portals, apps, and networked servers. The best part about Graphite is that is it runs well in Cloud infrastructure.

Originally designed and written by Chris Davis at Orbitz in 2006 Graphite was used as an alternative tool. However, it soon outgrew the founder’s expectations and became one of the top foundational monitoring tools in use. In the year2008, Orbitz decided to release Graphite under the open source Apache 2.0 license. Since then several companies have deployed Graphite to production where it helps them to monitor their production e-commerce services and plan for growth.

Advantages of using Graphite for representation of data and analytics:

Graphite stores every series as a unique identifier, composed of a metric name. It may or may not contain a set of tags. These tags are useful for describing the product metrics making it easier for us to design the initial surface and make further changes in near future.

A tagged series may be made up of a name and a set of tags, like “data.used;datacenter=dc1;rack=a1;server=web01”.  When working with data, make sure that each path component has a clear and well-defined purpose. Also, try to keep volatile path components as part of the main hierarchy.

Cassandra for Data Representation

Cassandra, a product of the Apache family, is a business database, which has been around for more than nine years. Mostly known for assured scalability and high availability, Cassandra was popularized by Facebook to improve upon its inbox search feature. Cassandra, which has been mostly used in a distributed system, makes use of small cues to gain knowledge of other nodes. P2P protocol is widely used for this purpose.

Cassandra is also good option if you are working with data coming from multiple sources. What Cassandra does is pretty interesting. It assigns a given rage of primary keys to each of the nodes. Let us assume, for example, values with hash values from 0 to 3 are placed on node 1, and the ones from 4 to 7 are placed on node 2, and the rest are placed on node3. The best part of working with Cassandra is it tells you where to look for the data and also devises faster ways of accessing and evenly spreading it across a cluster. This is a major reason why Cassandra is widely used across enterprises to model the data tables.

To know more about how Graphite and Cassandra can help you represent data better, read about industry best practices. Also, watch out for tips and tricks on how to use them for business purpose.