Easily embed analytics into your own apps with Imply’s DBaaS

Easily embed analytics into your own apps with Imply Polaris

Recently I blogged about what I call the “final mile” for building analytics applications: getting real-time insights into the hands of your end users (Spoiler alert: Imply Pivot).

Today, I’d like to expand on this final mile concept and discuss how you can leverage Imply Polaris to embed robust visualization options directly into your own applications without having to build a UI yourself.

Before we dive into it, let me give you a quick recap of what Polaris is all about. It starts with Druid-as-a-Service, with all the advantages of a fully managed cloud service plus additional built-in capabilities for data ingestion and visualization.  It enables you to start extracting insights from your data within minutes—without the need to procure any infrastructure. You can use the same cloud database to manage your data from start to scale, with automatic tuning and continuous upgrades that ensure the best performance at every stage of your application’s life.  And you get everything you need in a single UI including push-based ingestion and a visualization engine.

What is embedded analytics?

Embedded analytics is the integration of data analytics and visualization capabilities within an application to enable end-users to instantly access deep insights without requiring any separate tools.

Embedding data and insights in applications is integral to the experience of today’s apps.  We get our health stats from our fitness apps and we analyze traffic insights for the fastest commute. Consuming analytics is an expected part of each app experience.

It’s important to get up and running easily and be able to scale your embedded analytics to maintain good performance for every user. Your analytics may be mission-critical to your customers, so you want to ensure the data they see is both fresh and always available. It’s also critical to control which users can see which slices of data, so you maintain access management and security as you scale.

The build vs buy dilemma

People prefer to see data in ways they can understand. Data visualizations can be tricky—too many visual effects or too much information can make it harder for end users to easily decipher information and formulate key takeaways.

So how should you add visualization to your applications?

Some developers choose to build their own visualization solution, investing time and effort to gain more control of the software and more options for customization. With this approach, it’s really important to get the visualization solution up and running quickly and create a design that enables users to navigate and understand the data insights that are presented from the underlying analytics.

Building it yourself also allows you to handle security issues in-house, which is valuable for those who touch highly sensitive data (such as health or financial information). But building a solution also requires a significant amount of time (what’s the best design, UI, and UX?), dedicated resources, and a hefty budget, so it’s not the best option for everyone.

Other developers decide to leverage embedded visualization tools that accelerate application creation. While embedding analytics into applications is key, it can be undifferentiated heavy lifting and may not be scalable or sustainable for you to develop your own visualization tools in-house. There is a need to tightly integrate any visualization capabilities with the database layer which is not an easy task. Choosing a pre-built embedded analytics tool is typically quicker to market because it doesn’t require internal resources that are completely dedicated to creating a solution of their own. Of course, developers evaluating their options should ensure any pre-built option offers maximum security and customizable capabilities.

Imply Polaris takes on the heavy lifting

With Polaris, we do the heavy lifting – enabling you to easily perform high-speed analytics and embed and integrate visualizations directly into the overall experience you deliver to your customers.

Polaris provides embedding APIs to let you build an end-user experience that is suitable for your customers, focusing on what’s needed to make your application unique while providing a wide range of visualization options.

Getting an analytics solution embedded in your app up and running is only the beginning of the journey. Scaling the solution to meet the business needs, as well as continuing to evolve the product as requirements change, requires continued investment to deliver an excellent analytics experience that is on par with the rest of your product experience.

Polaris can help you not only embed visualizations quickly but stay ahead of the curve, with real-time performance at scale on large amounts of data.  In addition, with multitenancy controls and governed data access, Polaris ensures your end users can not access and see data that isn’t theirs.

You can set up an embedded visualization solution in under 5 minutes with our low-code UI workflow or build a highly customized application using the Polaris Embedding API or UI.  Check out this short demo that showcases the three easy steps:

Step 1:  Build your visualizations

Build interactive visualizations by easily slicing, dicing, and drilling down   into raw raw data at any volume.

Note:  Ensuring visualizations are always up to date as new data is ingested to Polaris is a simple process.  For streaming data, visualizations are automatically updated and for batch data, simply configure an ingestion task that will add ingested batch data to a Polaris table.

Step 2:  Embed analytics into your application

Copy and paste an embed link in the src attribute within the iFrame tag in your HTML.

Step 3:  You’re done

Your end users are now able to take advantage of insights in the form of dashboards and charts directly from your app. 

Embedding analytics into applications is a great way to differentiate your products by satisfying the needs of your end users who want easily accessible answers. 

Learn more and get started for free!

Ready to get started? Sign up for a free 30-day trial of Imply Polaris—no credit card required! As always, we’re here to help—if you want to learn more or simply have questions, set up a demo with an Imply expert.