Insights introduction#

Starburst Insights provides a visual overview of important metrics about your cluster for all types of users, from platform administrators to data consumers. From the Insights interface, you can access cluster performance information from a selected date range, such as:

  • CPU usage

  • Memory usage

  • Worker statistics

  • Cluster size

  • Query load

Additionally, users can drill down into query history, including:

  • Most accessed tables, and most active users by CPU time and queries

  • Most and least active queries

  • Completed query history

  • Query details, including query statistics and execution plan

Insights also includes an ad hoc querying tool, Worksheets.

Note

Insights requires a valid Starburst Enterprise license.

Requirements#

Insights requires a configured and operational event logger setup for full functionality, since it operates on the same database. Without the event logger database only limited information is available.

Installation#

Insights does not need to be installed separately. It is automatically included and activated on your coordinator, similar to how the Web UI is managed.

If the Web UI is disabled, Insights is disabled as well.

Configuration#

Insights is configured in the the config properties file on the coordinator only. To avoid startup failures, do not add the properties to the worker nodes config files.

You need to enable Insights to use the persisted data in the event logger database database with the properties in the following table. This activates all features of Insights including the query history page. Additionally, you can configure Insights to persist cluster metrics to the same database.

Cluster and query history-related configuration properties#

Property name

Description

Default

insights.persistence-enabled

Enable the query history functionality

false

insights.metrics-persistence-enabled

Enable the cluster history functionality

false

insights.jdbc.url

JDBC connection string URL for the event logger database

insights.jdbc.user

Username of the user with read/write access to the event logger database

insights.jdbc.password

Password of the user for event logger database access

The following optional properties allow you to fine-tune the functionality and behavior of Insights.

Optional Insights configuration properties#

Property name

Description

Default

insights.jdbc.connection-pool.max-size

Maximum number of connections to the event logger database in the connection pool in SEP

10

insights.jdbc.connection-pool.min-size

Minimum number of connections to the event logger database in the connection pool in SEP

1

insights.metrics-collection-interval

How often query and cluster metrics are sampled for the overview page

15s

insights.metrics-persistence-interval

How often query and cluster resource metrics are persisted for the cluster history page

60s

insights.max-samples

The number of sample data points to store in memory for the graphs on the overview page

120

insights.authorized-users

Regular expression for matching user names with unrestricted access to the query history

insights.authorized-groups

Regular expression for matching user groups with unrestricted access to the query history

Instructions for configuring Starburst Insights for Kubernetes deployments are available in the Kubernetes documentation.

Authorization examples#

Grant unrestricted access to users alice, bob, and charlie:

insights.authorized-users=alice|bob|charlie

Grant unrestricted access to user alice and any user in the admin group:

insights.authorized-users=alice
insights.authorized-groups=admin

Grant unrestricted access to everyone:

insights.authorized-users=.*

Note that if both insights.authorized-users and insights.authorized-groups are empty, no users will have unrestricted access.

Login and access#

You can access Insights by adding /insights to the URL of the Web UI URL of your coordinator:

Following are some examples:

URLs to access Web UI and Insights#

Web UI

Insights

https://sep.example.com/ui

https://sep.example.com/ui/insights

http://sep.example.com:8080/ui

http://sep.example.com:8080/ui/insights

https://localhost:8080/ui

https://localhost:8080/ui/insights

Use the same authentication details for Insights as used for the Web UI. With no authentication configured, use any username and log in.

Left-hand navigation#

With a successful login you access the overview screen including the left-hand navigation bar. It includes the following elements:

  • Overview to access the Overview tab

  • Query history to access the query history tab

  • Cluster history to access the cluster history tab

  • Usage metrics to access the usage metrics tab

  • Web UI to open the default Web UI in a new browser tab

  • Documentation to read the documentation

  • SEP version used by the cluster

  • Environment name of the cluster

  • Uptime of the cluster

  • Sign out to sign out of Insights and the Web UI