>> Time Series Insights is coming with a bunch of updates,
and we have Shipra,
from the TSI team here to tell us all about it.
All the way from UX enhancements to integration into Power BI.
That's today on the IoT Show.
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Hi, everyone. You're watching The Internet of Things show.
I'm Olivier, your host.
Today, we are talking about
Time Series Insights and what's new in there.
Shipra, thanks for joining the IoT show today.
>> Thank you for having me, Olivier. Thank you.
>> So tell us a bit about yourself before we jump into the topic.
Who are you? Which team are you working for,
and what are you doing in that team?
>> I am Shipra Mishra.
I worked for Azure Time Series Insights.
I'm a product manager on that team,
and I work on the infrastructure part of it. Yes.
>> Awesome. So we had [inaudible] and other people on the show
ready to talk a bit about Time Series Insights, introduce things.
What you came in to talk about is the new features,
the addition to Time Series Insights.
The series is growing,
it's actually listening to our customers and their feedback.
We're adding new features and new functionality.
So what are the main things that are
coming in that refresh of the TSI preview?
>> Yes. We're very excited
about all the new features that we're going to
showcase for Time Series Insights.
There are four main ones.
I'll start with the biggest one that we are going to support.
The first one is, we are going to support Warm store in TSI.
We have lot of UX enhancements in our Explorer.
Then we have added support for discrete variables.
>> Okay. We'll talk about that exactly what that is.
>> Yes. Then the last one is, now,
we support Power BI connector,
so you can actually export your data from explorer.
>> Awesome. We'll see how that works.
What the reason is, we're having these kind of connectors.
Let's talk about the first one.
What's going on with Warm storage? What is it?
How is it needed? Why is it needed,
and what is it that developers will benefit from?
>> Yes. So we've heard a lot from our customers.
Right now, the current skills that we have;
the customers have to pay for query,
and it does not work as well for a dash-boarding scenarios.
Where you have to pay for query and
you want to refresh your data every minute,
or every five seconds.
So with the support of Warm Store,
we are providing customers unlimited free queries.
>> Okay. So initially,
Time Series Insight was more
designed about getting historical data,
and analyzing that historical data was
a lot of data and combining data from different sources.
What you're telling me now is that we're
definitely looking at having Time Series Insights
also used for dashboarding in real-time visualization,
or near real-time visualization of IoT data, right?
>> Exactly. Yes.
>> Awesome. How about we look at how it's
looked thing like into the portal and on the websites.
>> Sure. So as you can see,
you must be familiar with this user interface,
this is Azure portal.
You can go and stop provisioning a new resource.
So here, I'm going to select Time Series Insights.
This is something that customers
are already aware of, whoever is provisioning.
So now, I'm going to select pay-as-you-go.
>> Okay.
>> Here is the new section.
>> So that's always queue that supports Warm Storage?
>> That is correct. Yes. So we supported on pay-as-you-go skill.
>> Got it.
>> As you can see, everything else remains the
same as we have in our current public preview.
But in refresh, what we have added is,
as you can see, there's a section of Warm Store here.
>> Okay.
>> Here, you can enable.
Now, as soon as you enable,
you can actually see your data retention,
which varies from seven all the way to 31 days.
By the way, this experiences
for when you are creating a new environment.
But if you have an existing one and you go in portal,
you would see this option
of adding a Warm Store to your existing environment.
>> You can enable it after it's been deployed. Got it.
>> Yes.
>> Great. Loved it.
>> So once you have provision of Warm Store,
you can actually go to your Explorer and you can start seeing
that Warm Store data in there.
>> Okay.
>> So I can show you that.
>> Let's see that, definitely.
>> So here, you'd start to see this orange line here.
This is showing you that this data is coming from Warm store.
>> Got it. Okay.
>> Yes. You can actually define your time duration,
and it will start to show you different data points.
More importantly, I want to show you this, which is pretty cool.
As you widen your time duration,
like you change your search span,
there's a back-end goal that has been made,
which is getting your data from both Cold Store and Warm Store.
>> Oh, and combines it and
in Explorer you don't see the difference.
>> Exactly.
>> Okay
>> But here, you can at least see this orange line.
It would represent what's the data that
is coming from Warm store and what's
the search span that you could,
if you just want to make a call through Warm store.
>> Make sense. If we had
a device actually injecting data in real-time,
we would actually see data coming along, right?
>> Yes.
>> Okay. Would it be the same type of
visualization using JavaScripts control
that we have for the web APIs?
>> Yes.
>> Okay. Similar things if
you're actually implementing your own UI,
feeding in data from
TSI would actually see real-time data in there?
>> Yes. In the API,
we have store type called Warm Store or so type called Cold Store.
>> Okay.
>> Yes.
>> Awesome.
>> Yes.
>> That's great. That's the first big one
that my people were waiting for.
You told me Ashley,
that makes a difference for how people are paying for it, right?
So you've mentioned the fact that previously,
you were paying for TSI when it comes to cold storage by query?
Now, we're talking about it's being by data and not query,
so that you can do the real-time query
to visualize data in real time, right?
>> Exactly. Which is why it's recommended that you add
Warm Store for your dashboarding scenarios
where you are querying lot of more recent data.
So your data size is not as much,
but then you're equating get to know
the status like manufacturing plants,
the sensor health status, those kind of scenarios.
>> Much needed.
>> Yes.
>> Awesome. So the second type
of updates were about the UX enhancements.
So let's go through some of
the biggest changes in the UX right now.
>> Yes. With public preview refresh,
we have also added lots of cool features in our Explorer.
So I will start with-
>> Three favorite ones.
>> Three your favorite ones. I'll start with,
as you can see, the time picker.
Here, people then like customers were asking for,
they didn't want to go and add the dates there.
So now, they have an option of selecting.
>> Okay. A time span like last something.
>> Exactly.
>> All right. Okay.
>> Then we have also introduced
some enhancements here in the search, as you can see.
By the way, this is our building 121-campus data.
>> Okay.
>> That's coming in life.
>> This is real data from real building, from real campus?
>> Yes.
>> Got it.
>> So let's say I'm looking for room temperature,
and it would show me both list-view and an hierarchy view.
>> Nice. Okay. But it's
good to remind people that TSI will
actually allow for creating models for data,
that allows you to have this hierarchy view of the datasets.
>> Yes. This is our hierarchy view.
We have introduced improvements in hierarchy
view enhancements for UX and hierarchy view as well.
I'm going to show that to you in a minute.
We have also introduced as you can see, this explorations.
Here, you can actually see that,
you can have a time-shift to one hour earlier.
It's very useful in the scenarios where
you know there's a processing lag,
when you start to see the data.
Let's say you always know that there's a processing lag
of 30 minutes, or one hour.
So what you can do is you can add that here,
and when you apply that,
that's how your data starts.
That's what the data shows you.
>> Got it.
>> Another thing that we have added in the settings.
You have support for [inaudible] interpolation.
We have min-max shadows that already exist,
and then we also support time-shift here.
>> Got it. Nice.
Everything, actually, is like instant.
>> Everything is instant, yes.
>> Very impressive.
>> Here I just want
to remove one and I want to show you something else.
>> They keep coming. New features of it.
>> So let's say, as you can see,
here you can have a stack.
>> Here or there?
>> Yeah. You have a stack view here
where each one has its own lane.
Then you can have share view,
and then you have an overlap view.
Basically, overlap is when you want to
see your data points at time intervals.
As you can see, it does not matter what
the amplitude is here, it could vary.
It could be very different in these two series.
But for an overlap scenario,
you can see how they are superimposing.
>> Got it. Okay.
>> By default, stack does what we show.
Then, another one is,
you can zoom in and you can see,
and then you can zoom out for more details.
You can also pick the chart that makes sense.
So we support heat-map and scatter plot,
I think Rahul and
Deepak from my team have already talked about these features here.
>> Yeah, we already talked about
scatter plot and the various other features like that.
But still they are coming so fast all these features and TSI
that it's always good to refresh people's minds.
So we are talking about data modeling in
TSI as well and you were telling me earlier on
that we have new features as well in the Explorer when it comes to
the yerkey view and the various modelings for data.
>> Yes. So I'll show you,
we have changed our experience a little bit for adding
types as you can see in hierarchies and adding those.
The work flow is still very similar to what it is right
now but it's more eye pleasing.
>> Okay.
>> Yes.
>> I guess, it's more intuitive,
it's more practical to use.
>> Yes. So let's say,
if you add a type,
it's exactly the same experience but
it's just more cohesive and it looks better.
>> Okay. So Shipra,
all good features in that new UX,
you told me about something called discrete variables,
I have no idea what that is.
So can you please enlighten me and explain to me what
that is and how it shows up in Time Series Insights.
>> Sure. It's very interesting,
and I'll give you an example.
Many times, customers have
this ask of they are sending data which is
actually a state of their sensors and what they are interested in,
let's say, if it's zero, which is off,
it's red, or it says green and similar kind of scenarios.
That's what we call discrete variables,
and we have added that support.
So in Explorer, you can actually go and create one.
>> I love it. It's not only about telemetry with actual values,
you can actually now have states. I get it. Okay.
>> Yes. So I'll give you an example,
I've created one here.
These are called categorical variables.
As you can see that it has label and it has values,
and you can add as many depending on what your scenario requires.
It support up to 100 states here.
>> I like it. Okay. So good and bad,
and anything in between.
>> Yeah, there are a lot of scenarios
where customers have been asking for it,
so finally, we are adding the support. Yes.
>> Now you have the type here and then in terms of visualization,
how does that show up?
>> So let's say the one that you are seeing here is,
I can move this.
So you can see like green is all good.
So you'd see the sensor 6 is showing you good, bad.
>> Nice. You can only see in the UI,
I can figure which color is which, and so forth.
>> Yeah. This is interesting because
as you can see that when I'm looking at
the visualization of these categorical variables,
I'm more interested in
what is the state of the sensor in a given time period,
which is why you are seeing that
when you hover over it you would be able to see that.
>> Awesome. Love it.
Last but not least.
So when it comes to IoT scenarios,
one thing that you like to do is to export data from
the IoT contexts to business applications,
and one tool of choice there to create dashboards and
visualizations that combine data from
different sources is Power BI.
Now we can export data from
Time Series Insights to Power BI with a connector?
>> Yes, we are very excited to showcase that to you.
We have gotten a lot of times customers
have been asking us for this connector because
there are a lot of scenarios in which they
have this data from TSI, and they want
to combine it with some other data source and
they want to do some deep analytics and exploration there.
So as you can see,
here you'd see more actions on Explorer.
When you click on it, you would see this.
>> Connect to Power BI. Love it.
>> Then you can actually copy it,
and then you can
go and you can actually say "Get Data", go to "More".
What you see here is already loaded up,
but I'm just walking you through
how customers would be able to connect.
So you go to Azure,
and you'd see Time Series Insights.
>> Nice. Okay.
>> Then when you say "Connect",
and in my previous screen you saw that I had copied a query there,
so I'm just going to paste it here and then I want to say "Okay",
and now it's going to connect.
It is going to load that up.
Then you can just add
your different data sources here and then you can explore.
>> So basically, it generated dataset for Power BI
that you can now integrate into
your Power BI Dashboards and others.
>> Exactly.
>> Straight forward, I love it. Thanks, Shipra.
So that's a lot of features that you just talked about. Right?
>> Yes. We are very excited about
it and we want people to try it out.
>> Awesome. So if you guys want to learn more
about TSI and the latest features,
you can go to aka.MS slash
IoT Show slash TSI like Time Series Insights.
Shipra, it was great to have you
on the show. I hope you're going to come back.
>> Thank you. Thanks, Olivier.
>> Thanks for watching the IoT Show. See you soon.
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