To summarize, Sisense is a business intelligence software that helps the businesses to better understand their data and come up with new ways in which they can extrapolate more information from their platform. This is made possible by the easy integration of the Sisense application with any application that the business operates. Sisense provides a visually intuitive and helpful analytics dashboard which is baked right into the organization’s own application. After integration, this tool can be used to input the data at runtime into the Sisense tool and perform quick analytical tasks for inference generation. The dashboard has a unique drag and drop interface that does not require any prior knowledge of complex machine learning and analytical algorithms. You simply need to choose the options that you require out of a list of provided options. The application does the rest for you.
What helps Sisense stand out from the competition is its quick and easy integration with third party applications. The generated outputs and inference can be made available in different formats all at the click of a button. Its ease of use and its quick visualization techniques (like generating graphs and charts on the fly) make this tool very useful during meetings and also enable the users to talk about the next steps in a well-informed manner.
Installation
To start with Sisense installation on your Linux machine, you need to carefully follow this step-by-step guide:
We start with creating a user account with super user privileges first. This is required so that the installation and later running of the Sisense process do not face any hindrances with respect to permissions.
Run the following command in the terminal:
We now make sure that the user that we created has an UID/GID of 1000 by running the following command in the terminal:
You should see a terminal output which is similar to the following:
We must now navigate to the directory from where we plan on installing Sisense by running the following command in the terminal:
Now that we are in the designated folder, we use the wget tool to download the Sisense “tar.gz” file in this folder. Use the link which is provided to you during the setup of your requirements and specifications.
Run the following command in the terminal:
Once this has finished downloading, we extract the downloaded file into the same folder that we are already in.
Run the following command:
Once the extraction is completed, we change the directory again and move into the extracted folder by running the following command in the terminal:
Now that we are in the correct subdirectory, we are required to make changes to the configuration file. These changes are based on the type of setup that you require. For example, the changes differ when it comes to single node deployment or multi node deployment.
NOTE: We open the configuration file in a text editor and make the changes which are listed in the user guide before proceeding to step 8.
Once all of the changes are made, we run the configuration file by running the following command in the terminal:
You are now prompted to select either YES or NO as to whether or not you want to proceed with the deployment.
In the event of any failures or issues, you can review the installation logs by running the following command in the terminal:
With this, Sisense should be up and running on your machine. You can access the link for Sisense to access in your browser by running the following command in your terminal:
This should return a link for you to access in your browser.
User Guide
As mentioned earlier in the installation guide, you need to make the following changes in the configuration file before you proceed to step 8.
Once the single_config.yaml is open in a text editor, we proceed to make the following changes to the file:
You can find further details on the Sisense web page to help the new users with setting up the configuration file. The resources that are provided here are courtesy of the Sisense group.
Conclusion
There are many business analytics tools that operate in the background to help the businesses to learn and grow. What they all have in common is their ability to perform analytics on the data which are generated or gathered by the business. Where Sisense leads is its quick and easy integration with any business’ primary platform. What this does is it allows the admins to perform quick analyses on the data that comes in real time. With their comprehensive analytics dashboard is integrated into your own application, you are able to visualize the data, perform quick analytical tasks on specific data, and even create your own model pipelines that are run on any data that comes in real time.
