Banana

The Banana project was forked from Kibana, and works with all kinds of time series (and non-time series) data stored in Apache Solr. It uses Kibana's powerful dashboard configuration capabilities, ports key panels to work with Solr, and provides significant additional capabilities, including new panels that leverage D3.js.

The goal is to create a rich and flexible UI, enabling users to rapidly develop end-to-end applications that leverage the power of Apache Solr. Data can be ingested into Solr through a variety of ways, including Logstash, Flume and other connectors.

IMPORTANT

Pull the repo from the release branch for production deployment; version x.y.z will be tagged as x.y.z

develop branch is used for active development and cutting edge features. fusion branch is used for Lucidworks Fusion release. The code base and features are the same as develop. The main difference is in the configuration.

Banana 1.6.26

This release includes the following bug fixes and improvement:

1. Enhance heatmap
   • Add axis and axis labels
   • Add axis grid and ticks
   • Add gradient legend and ranges
   • Fix heatmap transpose icon
   • Enhance positioning and padding of panel elements
   • Fix bettermap tooltip and hint text
2. Enhance hits panel
   • Add panel horizontal and vertical direction option
   • Fix metrics text and label overlap and margins
3. Fix bettermap render issue when resized
4. Fix jshint warnings

Older Release Notes

You can find all previous Release Notes on our wiki page.

Installation and Quick Start

Requirements

• A modern web browser. The latest version of Chrome and Firefox have been tested to work. Safari also works, except for the "Export to File" feature for saving dashboards. We recommend that you use Chrome or Firefox while building dashboards.
• Solr 6.x or at least 4.4+ (Solr server's endpoint must be open, or a proxy configured to allow access to it).
• A webserver (optional).

Installation Options

Option 1: Run Banana webapp within your existing Solr instance

Solr 5+ Instructions

1. Run Solr at least once to create the webapp directory (this step might be unnecessary for Solr 6):

    cd $SOLR_HOME/bin
    ./solr start
   

2. Copy banana folder to $SOLR_HOME/server/solr-webapp/webapp/

    cd $SOLR_HOME/server/solr-webapp/webapp
    cp -R $BANANA_HOME/src ./banana
   

   NOTES: For production, you should run grunt build command to generate the optimized code in dist directory. And then copy the dist directory to the production web server. For example:

    cd $BANANA_HOME
    npm install
    bower install
    grunt build
    cp -R ./dist $SOLR_HOME/server/solr-webapp/webapp/banana
   

3. Browse to http://localhost:8983/solr/banana/index.html

Solr 4 Instructions

1. Run Solr at least once to create the webapp directories:

    cd $SOLR_HOME/example
    java -jar start.jar
   

2. Copy banana folder to $SOLR_HOME/example/solr-webapp/webapp/

3. Browse to http://localhost:8983/solr/banana/src/index.html

NOTES: If your Solr server/port is different from localhost:8983, edit banana/src/config.js and banana/src/app/dashboards/default.json to enter the hostname and port that you are using. Remember that banana runs within the client browser, so provide a fully qualified domain name (FQDN), because the hostname and port number you provide should be resolvable from the client machines.

If you have not created the data collections and ingested data into Solr, you will see an error message saying "Collection not found at .." You can use any connector to get data into Solr. If you want to use Logstash, please go to the Solr Output Plug-in for Logstash Page for code, documentation and examples.

Option 2: Complete SLK Stack

Lucidworks has packaged Solr, Logstash (with a Solr Output Plug-in), and Banana (the Solr port of Kibana), along with example collections and dashboards in order to rapidly enable proof-of-concepts and initial development/testing. See http://www.lucidworks.com/lucidworks-silk/.

Option 3: Building and installing from a WAR file

NOTES: This option is only applicable to Solr 5 or 4. Solr 6 has a different architecture.

1. Pull the source code of Banana version that you want from the release branch in the repo; For example, version x.y.z will be tagged as x.y.z.

2. Run a command line ant from within the banana directory to build the war file:

       cd $BANANA_HOME
       ant

3. The war file will be called banana-<buildnumber>.war and will be located in $BANANA_HOME/build. Copy the war file and banana's jetty context file to Solr directories:

• For Solr 5:

      cp $BANANA_HOME/build/banana-<buildnumber>.war $SOLR_HOME/server/webapps/banana.war
      cp $BANANA_HOME/jetty-contexts/banana-context.xml $SOLR_HOME/server/contexts/

• For Solr 4:

      cp $BANANA_HOME/build/banana-<buildnumber>.war $SOLR_HOME/example/webapps/banana.war
      cp $BANANA_HOME/jetty-contexts/banana-context.xml $SOLR_HOME/example/contexts/

4. Run Solr:

• For Solr 5:

      cd $SOLR_HOME/bin/
      ./solr start

• For Solr 4:

      cd $SOLR_HOME/example/
      java -jar start.jar

5. Browse to http://localhost:8983/banana (or the FQDN of your Solr server).

Option 4: Run Banana webapp in a web server

Banana is an AngularJS app and can be run in any webserver that has access to Solr. You will need to enable CORS on the Solr instances that you query, or configure a proxy that makes requests to banana and Solr as same-origin. We typically recommend the latter approach.

Storing Dashboards in Solr

If you want to save and load dashboards from Solr, then you need to create a collection called banana-int first. For Solr 6, here are the steps:

    cd $SOLR_HOME/bin
    ./solr create -c banana-int

For Solr 5 and 4, you have to create the banana-int collection using the configuration files provided in either the resources/banana-int-solr-5.0 (for Solr 5) directory or the resources/banana-int-solr-4.5 directory (for Solr 4.5). If you are using SolrCloud, you will need to upload the configuration into ZooKeeper and then create the collection using that configuration.

The Solr server configured in config.js will serve as the default node for each dashboard; you can configure each dashboard to point to a different Solr endpoint as long as your webserver and Solr put out the correct CORS headers. See the README file under the resources/enable-cors directory for a guide.

Changes to your dashboards

If you created dashboards for Banana 1.0.0, you did not have a global filtering panel. In some cases, these filter values can be implicitly set to defaults that may lead to strange search results. We recommend updating your old dashboards by adding a filtering panel. A good way to do it visually is to put the filtering panel on its own row and hide it when it is not needed.

FAQ

Q: How do I secure my Solr endpoint so that users do not have access to it?
A: The simplest solution is to use an Apache or nginx reverse proxy (See for example https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/ajax-solr/pLtYfm83I98).

Q: Can I use banana for non-time series data?
A: Yes, from version 1.3 onwards, non-time series data are also supported.

Resources

1. Lucidworks SILK: http://www.lucidworks.com/lucidworks-silk/
2. Webinar on Lucidworks SILK: http://programs.lucidworks.com/SiLK-introduction_Register.html.
3. Logstash: http://logstash.net/
4. SILK Use Cases: https://github.com/LucidWorks/silkusecases. Provides example configuration files, schemas and dashboards required to build applications that use Solr and Banana.

Publishing WAR Artifacts to Maven Central

1. Get hold of maven-ant-tasks-X.X.X.jar and put it in this directory
2. Execute ant -lib . deploy from this directory, this will sign the Maven artifacts (currently just .war) and send them to a Sonatype OSSRH staging repository. Details of how to set this up can be found here. N.B. Ensure that you have an release profile contained within ~/.m2/settings.xml
3. Once you've read, and are happy with the staging repos, close it.

Support

Banana uses the dashboard configuration capabilities of Kibana (from which it is forked) and ports key panels to work with Solr. Moreover, it provides many additional capabilities like heatmaps, range facets, panel specific filters, global parameters, and visualization of "group-by" style queries. We are continuing to add many new panels that go well beyond what is available in Kibana, helping users build complete applications that leverage the data stored in Apache Solr, HDFS and a variety of sources in the enterprise.

If you have any questions, please email [email protected]

Trademarks

Kibana is a trademark of Elasticsearch BV
Logstash is a trademark of Elasticsearch BV