Chapter 13. Case study: real-time dashboard
This chapter covers
- An example Spark Streaming application
- A real-time dashboard application example
- Explanation of the application components
- Running the application
- Examining the source code
In this chapter, we’ll show you how to use Spark in a real-life application. For the example application in this chapter, we’ll show you how to build a real-time dashboard (a control panel with monitoring instruments) for viewing statistics calculated from a web server’s access log files. We’ll first explain the main idea behind the application. Then we’ll show you how to run it using shell scripts and a Docker image (which we prepared for you at https://github.com/spark-in-action/uc1-docker) and how to run the components manually, if you choose to do so. At the end of the chapter, we’ll explain the application code.
You can use this example application as a starting point for your own dashboard. You can extend the example to track additional metrics, or you can use it to show a dashboard for something entirely different than web-access logs. You can replace some of the components with your own, and more. The first step is to see it in action and understand how it works. Let’s get to it.