What is Real Time User Facing Analytics?
Real time user facing analytics provides customers and employees with direct access to data analysis results as soon as possible. This typically involves dashboards that display data using graphs and other easily understandable formats. Essentially, the goal of user facing analytics is to provide the data users need to make informed decisions without relying on data analysts or other specialists.
There are three crucial aspects of user-facing analytics: data freshness, query latency, and query throughput. This post introduces a solution architecture for implementing a scalable user-facing analytics solution and explains how each component efficiently addresses each aspect.
What to consider before building user-facing analytics?
Think of a user logging into their mobile service provider’s mobile application. The user might see a dashboard that shows how much data they’ve used in the current billing cycle, how much data remains in their package, and a forecast based on their current consumption rate. This dashboard might also provide insights into their usage patterns, such as peak usage times or the apps that consume the most data.
This real-time information can help the user make informed decisions about their data usage and avoid overage charges.
But what does it take to design and implement such a dashboard? Implementing a user-facing analytics solution requires three critical characteristics:
- Data freshness is the ability to ingest and process data in real time, ensuring users have the most current insights.
- Ultra-low query latency is key to a responsive user experience. It allows complex queries to be processed quickly, even when dealing with large volumes of data.
- High query throughput, facilitated by a system’s capacity to handle a large number of simultaneous queries, is crucial in user-facing analytics because it ensures the system can support a large user base without slowing down or crashing. This results in a seamless and responsive user experience, even under heavy load.
How to design a user-facing analytics solution
Handisi Real Time Analytics Platform, powered by Apache Pinot database, is the real-time analytics platform trusted in production, at scale for user-facing applications.