Sisense is a powerful data analytics tool, with a wide range of features and considerable data processing capacity. However, it doesn’t do everything by itself. The choice of hardware, connection and operating system directly impact the performance, agility, and available features. This is especially apparent when we compare Sisense performance on Linux vs. Windows operating systems.
Why migrate Sisense to Linux?
The main argument is that the company itself, having adopted a Linux First policy, recommends using Linux. This means every feature developed for Sisense is first made available for Linux systems, and only later (if ever) for Windows. Here’s a few examples:
Custom code
Custom Code feature in Sisense enables you to run Python from within your Jupyter notebooks to transform, prepare, and cleanse data inside your ElastiCube models as part of the build process. The feature enables you to use machine learning, clean data without requiring queries, validate data in real time, and much more.
Simply Ask
It enables you to ask sophisticated questions using natural language and immediately receive visualizations that provide you with the answers. As you enter your questions, Sisense provides automatic suggestions to help you build your query. These suggestions are recommended by Sisense’s proprietary Knowledge Graph, which studies the associations between all entities on the system (users, data, models, widgets, formulas, clicks, filters, and more) to understand the collective wisdom of the organization. This leads to more “human” and context-aware outcomes from the Sisense AI engine. Simply Ask offers an easy way for anyone, regardless of their role, to get insights from their data.
Notebooks
Notebooks is the Sisense coding interface that enables data analysts to write ad-hoc queries and easily transform them into visualizations, for rapid and agile exploration. Using a live connector, Notebooks enables you to test your data or get preliminary results from an ad-hoc SQL, Python or R query before visualizing the data with dashboards. This means that you can enter and execute a query to immediately view the results.
Linux and the Kubernetes technology
The Linux First policy isn’t simply a matter of loving the cute penguin logo or it being an open-source operating system with a large community of developers. Linux is much more scalable. The reason for that scalability is Kubernetes, an open-source container orchestration system that automates the deployment, scaling and management of application containers. Originally designed by Google, Kubernetes is currently maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, a partnership between Google and the Linux Foundation.
Migrating Sisense to Linux
Here at BlueMetrics, we have helped several customers migrate Sisense to Linux. Like anything else, this is a job that requires planning. First, understanding how the customer is currently using Sisense is essential. How much memory are they using, how many dashboards are they running, what’s the volume of data, cubs, etc. That information enables us to size machine requirements. Here at BlueMetrics, we usually work with AWS, but some customers might prefer a different option, or even having their own hardware.
Next, we copy the customer’s most important dashboard and cube and run tests on the new server. The test shows how the data behaves on the new system and what the most frequent errors are, as well as pointing to what we can do before completing the migration process. We then back up all the Sisense resources—users, groups, hierarchies, cubes, dashboards, branding, color palettes, settings, data security rules—and migrate to the Linux server. Finally, we check whether every dashboard is working properly and fix remaining bugs.
You can count on BlueMetrics
The migration process might not be simple, but the benefits are worth the effort and the investment, especially when you remember that using Linux means you do not have the cost of licensing the operating system. And if you need help migrating Sisense to Linux, here’s one last tip: you can count on BlueMetrics!
