Bold BI by Syncfusion

Posted on Feb 9

Monitor and Enhance Your Network Performance with Embedded Analytics

#embeddedanalytics #datanalytics

Introduction

Networks are critical for every business, large or small. Data transmitted across, within, and between networks is often critical, meaning any disruption in a network can have dire consequences for the businesses affected. To avoid disruptions, network health is monitored through frequent analysis. Network monitoring software allows a company to observe its network’s behavior, track the devices that make up the network and those connected to it, and discover any performance problems as they emerge.

Embedded analytics promotes network performance monitoring by visualizing and reporting on network health status. This helps track areas that require maintenance, avoid overcrowded networks, and maintain a high level of service and availability for the business.

In this blog, I am going to discuss the following topics:

What is embedded analytics?
Benefits of embedded analytics in a network performance monitoring dashboard.
Bold BI Network Management Dashboard example.
How to embed analytical tools into network performance monitoring apps.

What is embedded analytics?

Embedded analytics is the integration of analytical solutions and data visualization capabilities into a software application’s user interface to improve data comprehension and usability. Bold BI^® helps you easily embed an analytics solution into your everyday work applications using a JavaScript SDK and server application. This enables the network team to have a clear view of users’ preferences and how they interact with different services, helping the team understand trends and optimize network usage.

Benefits of embedded analytics in a network performance monitoring dashboard

Network monitoring improves the day-to-day performance of every company. The following explains how embedded analytics promotes network performance via a monitoring dashboard:

Increases productivity.
Mitigates risk.
Promotes device maintenance.
Promotes time management.

Increases productivity

Network performance monitoring enables the telecommunication industry to offer quality services to its customers. While the network performs as needed, business can be conducted without interruption. By tracking key metrics and KPIs such as total services, delays, call setup times, and more, the network provider can understand network flows, allowing client businesses to function smoothly and leading to high productivity.

Mitigating risk

Embedded analytics helps a company detect even the slightest change that occurs in its network outside of normal operations. For example, the company can immediately know when an employee accesses a site without proper authorization, which could lead to security breaches. By regularly monitoring activity, the network security team can easily identify areas likely to suffer data breaches and implement proactive measures to avoid them. Also, tracking key metrics such as packet loss, packet reordering, device availability, and others helps the network team generate strategies to resolve identified issues and reduce chances of network failure.

Promotes device maintenance

Embedded analytics helps a company effectively monitor its networking devices and perform periodic maintenance throughout device lifecycles by monitoring key metrics such as latency, call quality, and more. Tracking all the network device data helps the networking team find out if there is a problem or if an upgrade is required on certain devices.

Promotes time management

Embedded analytics in the telecommunications industry promotes the management of time in a networking sense of the concept. By tracking key metrics such as latency, jitter, throughput time, and more, the network infrastructure team can identify and investigate any unusual events that affect such metrics.

Bold BI Network Monitoring Dashboard example

The Network Monitoring Dashboard example showcases essential metrics for a telecom service company such as dropped services, jitter, delay, call setup time, bit rate, packet loss, round-trip time, and throughput time.

KPIs and metrics

Call Quality – Customer Satisfaction by Region
Packet Loss
Throughput Time
Jitter
Round-Trip Time
Bit Rate
Call Setup Time
Delay

Call quality – customer satisfaction by region

This treemap tracks customer satisfaction regarding call quality and breaks it down by region. It helps identify and prioritize areas that need the most attention at the call center.

Packet loss

This spline chart measures when one or more packets of data being transported across the internet or a computer network fail to reach their destination.

Throughput time

This spline chart shows the amount of time it takes for a message to be sent successfully over the network throughout the course of a day. It also features a trendline showing the general direction of the throughput time.

Jitter

This spline chart shows the variance in delay for a packet based on its position in the queues of routers along the packet’s path between its source and destination.

Round-trip time

This spline chart shows the amount of time it takes the network to move data from the server to where a browser has sent a request and back to the server.

Bit rate

This spline chart shows the number of bits that pass a given point in the network in a given amount of time.

Call setup time

This spline chart shows the average time required to establish a circuit-switched call between users.

Delay

This spline chart indicates the average amount of delay occurring in data communications over a network.

To know more about the metrics and KPIs used in this dashboard example, refer to the Network Management Dashboard example.

How to embed analytical tools into network performance monitoring apps

In the remainder of this blog, I am going to explain how to embed dashboards into your Angular applications. Consider a scenario where your telecommunications company or team has a website like the one shown in the following image.

You can embed dashboards easily using Bold BI and avoid building an analytics or BI solution yourself. Follow these steps to embed your dashboards successfully.

Prerequisites

Download and install the Bold BI server in your local machine and create a dashboard. You can find the installation and deployment steps here.

Step 1: Create an Angular application.

First, create a new Angular project in Visual Studio Code and add the necessary TS files to the project as shown in the following image.

For more guidance, refer to the sample code in the Bold BI documentation.

In this demonstration, the Angular application acts as a client, and an ASP.NET Core application acts as a server. You need to add several properties in the app.component.ts file as shown in the following table and screenshot.

Properties	Property Value Descriptions
RootUrl	Bold BI dashboard server URL. For example: https://localhost:5000/bihttps://dashboard. Syncfusion.com/bi
SiteIdentifier	For Bold BI, it should be something like “site/site1”.For the Bold BI Cloud Analytics Server, it should be an empty string.
Environment	Your Bold BI application environment.If using Bold BI Cloud Analytics Server, you should use “cloud”. If using Bold BI, you should use “enterprise”.
User Email	The Bold BI server will use an email address to authorize the authorization server.

import { Component, Injectable } from '@angular/core';
import { Router, ActivatedRoute } from '@angular/router';
import { appService } from './app.service';
import { Item } from './app';

@Component({
    selector: 'app-root',
    templateUrl: './app.component.html',
    styleUrls: ['./app.component.css'],
    providers: [appService]
})

@Injectable()

export class AppComponent {

    //ASP.NET Core application would be run on http://localhost:61777/, which needs to be set as "apiHost"
    public apiHost = "http://localhost:5000";

    //Dashboard Server BI URL (ex: http://localhost:5000/, https://demo.boldbi.com/bi/)
    public rootUrl = "http://localhost:5000/bi";

    //For Bold BI Enterprise edition, it should be like 'site/site'. For Bold BI Cloud, it should be empty string.
    public siteIdentifier = "site/site1";

    //Url of the GetDetails action in ValuesController of the ASP.NET Core application
    public authorizationUrl = "/api/home/getdetails";

    //Url of the GetDashboards action in ValuesController of the ASP.NET Core application
    public getDashboardUrl = "/api/home/getdashboards";
    public baseUrl = "";
    public dashboardServerApiUrl = "";
    public dashboards: Item[];
    constructor(private _app: appService) {
    }
    ngOnInit() {
    }
}

After adding these properties, we need to create the Bold BI instance.

Step 2: Create a Bold BI instance.

After the Angular web application is created, you need to create a Bold BI instance to communicate between the server side (any web application) and the client side (Angular application), which allows us to embed a Bold BI dashboard in the Angular application.

Step 3: Create an authorization server to authenticate the Bold BI server.

Every application that embeds a Bold BI dashboard or widget must be authorized with the Bold BI server. This authentication step requires sending confidential information to the Bold BI server, such as users’ email addresses, group data, and embed signatures. So, in your server application, implement this authentication flow and provide the URL for connecting to your server in the Bold BI embedded instance.

Step 4: Run the Angular application to view the embedded dashboard.

In the Angular application, enter the authorization URL and dashboard URL that were defined in the ASP.NET Core application. Finally, you can that see the dashboard created in the Bold BI server is embedded in your web application.

By following the previous steps, you can embed your dashboard into your Angular application.

To learn more about embedding dashboards into your Angular applications, refer to this blog. You can also download the sample code used in the previous steps from our documentation.

Conclusion

Bold BI^® helps you integrate dashboards in your applications written in ASP.NET Core, ASP.NET MVC, Angular, ASP.NET, and Ruby on Rails . It will save you time and prevent you from doing redundant work. Click this link to explore its features. To learn more about embedding dashboards into your application, refer to this blog and our documentation.

I hope now you have a better understanding of Bold BI and how it can help businesses with network performance monitoring. You can create a dashboard any way you like with Bold BI’s 35+ widgets and 150+ data sources.

To get started with Bold BI, sign up for a free trial and begin creating interactive business intelligence dashboards. You can contact us by submitting questions through the Bold BI website or, if you already have an account, you can log in to submit your support question.

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