Introduction to Symphony 24
Symphony is an embeddable business intelligence platform for data exploration, visual analytics, and creating & sharing dashboards, reports, and more. You can deploy it as the central data portal for your organization, or integrate it into an existing website as part of a custom or embedded BI solution. Symphony is flexible enough to adapt to your needs and to every type of user.
Symphony delivers the first out-of-the-box development experience for embedded analytics. Choose Symphony for:
Its effortless authoring paradigm empowers developers to easily create, customize and embed data visualizations with complete control over the end user experience.
The self-service embedded with a visualization can be tailored and configured to match the skill level of your end users, while enabling them to modify and share their own visualizations.
Its internal query engine (z-Engine) and smart data connectors unlock unmatched modern data connectivity and query performance while also working with your existing tech stack.
Its cloud-ready microservices architecture provides you with elastic scale so that your CFO loves you and your DevOps team respects you.
When you are ready to get started with Symphony, see Get Started With Symphony 24.
For information about the job skills necessary to use Symphony, see Symphony User Personas.
Effortless Authoring
Symphony's effortless authoring allows your developers to avoid heavy data modeling using a data authoring workflow that streamlines data connectivity, preparation and enrichment. You can rapidly build embedded analytics content with an easy-to-use visual authoring workflow and create a persistent look and feel by seamlessly embedding analytics into your application with custom themes and extensibility that goes beyond just colors and styling.
You can build visuals once and reuse them to populate multiple dashboards, eliminating the need to recreate them over and over again. Finally, you can enjoy the ultimate end user control that a complete embedded analytics development environment provides to develop and manage content directly in your existing application’s workflow.
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Embedded Self-Service
Self-Serve Business Intelligence
Using Symphony's embedded self-service, your end users will enjoy the freedom to securely collaborate and share content on-demand or with automated scheduled delivery.
Symphony gives you the ability to perform data exploration and analysis, run ad hoc queries, and create your own dashboards and reports, all without having to involve your organization's technical or IT staff.
Using the interactive screens, you can easily explore available data sources, use intuitive operations to visualize your data, and arrange it in dashboard, multi-page report, scorecard, and small multiple views. Apply formulas using a familiar toolbar interface, access other analysis options with a single click, or ask the Assistant for help. Smart defaults and automatic data preparation are used throughout Symphony to provide a streamlined workflow, which means there are a lot fewer steps needed to progress from your data to desired visuals.
While other products take a one-size-fits-all approach, we empower your application teams to embed and customize end user self-service with embedded visualizations. Granular controls allow you to define levels of end user self-service and dashboard interactivity at the feature level. Precise controls over end user data access and governance ensure a secure discovery experience. You can provide end users with the freedom to visually author analytic content and perform ad hoc analysis all within your application.
In addition, Data DVR enables your end users to explore and interact with embedded content, including play, rewind, pause and fast forward of raw data and charts.
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Query Engine and Smart Data Connectors
Respecting the uniqueness of data stores, the internal query engine (also called z-Engine) and smart data connectors allow you to explore SaaS scale data sets with speed and scale including relational, NoSQL, multisource and other non-traditional data stores.
The query engine analyzes and optimizes queries and pushes processing down to the data store to enable the processing of thousands of concurrent user requests. Its data fusion technology empowers multisource analysis that allows end users to easily interact with visualizations from multiple data sources by virtually combining them so they appear to be from a single source.
Our broad set of smart data connectors for modern data stores such as search engines, streaming, and cloud data warehouses let you access all your data without the need to move or prepare the data in advance. Symphony uses your existing data infrastructure and security framework, eliminating the need for redundant technology investments and on-going maintenance efforts by your team.
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Microservices Architecture
Symphony's microservice architecture is comprised of code that is adaptable and extensible. It runs on a wide variety of modern data platforms and architectures. It allows data store connectivity to run independently from the query engine and it allows you to build, deploy, and automate at cloud speed.
The horizontal scale provided with distributed microservices helps you avoid single points of failure and assures high availability with no proprietary hardware required. This elastic scale lets you optimize computer resources and avoid waste by scaling up and down resources such as CPU process power and RAM when and where you need it.
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Fully Open APIs
Symphony is built on a completely open API platform designed for extensibility, integration, and embedding. Every capability you see in the user interface from administration through to analysis and views can be embedded, and is powered by public .NET, REST, and JavaScript APIs, which you have access to as well. You can insert your own custom extensions into virtually any part of the workflow using the same plug-in architecture used for built-in components, including data providers, transforms, formulas, visualizations, export providers, and much more. Tailor to your needs using custom CSS and JavaScript, the familiar syntax of DundasScript in calculations and advanced formulas, or the built-in JavaScript editor with pop-up help and suggestions.
HTML5, Mobile & Touch
The client-side of theSymphony is based entirely on the latest web standards including HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS. There is no requirement for browser plug-ins, or for users to install software. This means Symphony works and looks the same on a desktop as it does on a mobile device such as a tablet or smartphone. The user interface fully supports touch-based gestures so you can analyze data or design dashboards and reports directly on an iPad, or administer from your phone. All you need is a standards-compliant browser for your device.
Data Visualizations
Symphony provides a wide array of data visualization types you can use to analyze and view your data, including a complete chart library, maps, tables, gauges, relationship diagrams and more. Visualizations are highly interactive and responsive, with intuitive animated transitions, and with performance and support for ad hoc analysis in mind. We've programmed our visualizations with styles and behavior that automatically conform to established best practices in data visualization, and smart visualizations can make choices and recommendations for you as you work with your data, including one-click advanced analytics. Each visualization is rich with features and customization options for optimal gaining and sharing of insights.
ETL Layer & In-Memory Analytics
Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) capability is built directly into Symphony via our data cube layer. A wide variety of transforms are available for you to add and connect together to perform data cleansing, integrate data from different sources, access machine learning and other advanced analytics with R or Python, and any other data preparation you may need. Data cubes can also store data input through a spreadsheet-like interface or through custom forms on dashboards. The output of a data cube is a reusable data model you can prepare with predefined formatting and metadata and share with others. Connect to your data live, store it as needed in our internal data warehouse for improved performance, or build it as an in-memory model to enable even faster analytical query results.
Administration & Configuration
Symphony provides a flexible data security model, which includes complete built-in support for optional multi-tenant / SaaS deployment. You can use whatever form of authentication you need for seamless integration with your own applications or systems, with a variety of standard protocols ready to use. For scalability, load balancing is supported through the use of application and data processing server groups, and containerization and Kubernetes support for scaling on cloud or server cluster deployments. Authorized users can access administrative tasks with one click from Symphony's menu, using intuitive interfaces to manage the complete set of configuration settings, logs, licensing, user account management, and other application functions, without additional tools.
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