Gone are the days when we would spend countless hours developing intuitive dashboard software that displays/monitor key performance indicator (KPIs) to help the executives steer the company. IBM Watson Analytics moved several steps ahead by digesting any type of data for any domain, deriving relationships between the data, often making it a child's play to explore the data and finally providing a way to predict the future based on existing data patterns.
If you know what your data is about, leave the rest to Watson. All of this is on the cloud (no installation required) and free to try. Trust me it will not take more than 10 to 15 minutes to experience the power. Here is where you need to click https://www.ibm.com/watson-analytics and try it for FREE!!
To understand more let’s scale down from a corporate dataset to a home-based dataset. Like electric power and cooking gas, the internet became the new normal and essential supply for most homes. Though busy with our day jobs and personal work at home, it becomes important for us to monitor all of these essential services that will make our living comfortable and help us deliver better.
We often have questions like …
- When was my electric power supply hit peek voltage, how many times it happened in the last year and when can it happen again this year so that I would keep my high-value electric equipment safe.
- How is my broadband speed changing over a time period, when was it last disconnected, how many times it got disconnected so that I could measure the quality of service?
- How are the temperature and humidity changing in my house and does that have any relationship to the seasonal flu
- How are my security cameras performing, its essential to get a notification when any of it is disconnected
At a high level, there are two components that could be explored to answer the questions like the above
1. A Raspberry Pi doing all the 24X7 work for you. Attached with SenseHAT for temperature and humidity sensors for continuous monitoring, logging, and reporting in real-time
2. IBM Watson Analytics to load the historical data, explore and predict future outcomes.
Raspberry Pi uses
- Node-Red service with Dashboard and SenseHAT modules added
- speedtest_cli to measure the bandwidth speed from command line
- OpenWeatherMap REST APIs for reporting the location weather
- email / SMS integration for notifications.
Node-Red orchestration displays a live real-time dashboard and logs the data into CSV files
In the Node-Red drag-drop the required nodes and build the flow that …
- Checks the internet status at regular time intervals and log the ‘Internet UP/DOWN” status
- Collects the bandwidth upload and download speeds on regular intervals and logs them
- Collects the Raspberry Pi temperature on regular intervals and logs them
- Collects the ambient temperature and humidity on regular intervals and logs them
- Collects the location temperature and humidity details on regular intervals by calling the OpenWeatherMap REST API
- Constantly keeps track of local disk space and automatically moves CSV files to an external disk
This list can go on and on like monitoring the security cameras and automatically clean up the cloud storage space that stores the recording/motion detected photos etc.,
The Node-Red Dashboard module is used to build a simple auto-refreshing dashboard that is a single page view of the key indicators.Here is a github project of the same that could be used for free: https://github.com/srinivasgnv/cmu
Here is an example of the real-time dashboard
When all of this data get’s collected for, let’s say for a few months/year(s) users can perform analytics on this data to derive insights and answer cognitive questions like above. To do this register to IBM Watson Analytics and follow these simple steps.
- Upload the CSV files (make sure there is a heading for each file describing the columns )
- Use the Explore option where Watson digests the dataset and automatically comes up with interesting relationships in the data
- Provides an option to ask questions and get answers
- Predict future outcomes.
All of this is without writing a single line of code. Yes, you read it correctly. You have to try this to experience the power of Watson Analytics.
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