Chapter 6. Advanced Integrations and Development

In this chapter, we will be discussing additional methods of integration and development. We will start with building a modular D3 visualization, which is an expansion of the D3 visualization from the last chapter. Using modular visualizations allows you to be more flexible with your dashboards and allows you to tweak a particular visualization for all dashboards in which it has been used. We will discuss modular inputs and how to create and test them. Modular inputs allow you to consume the same type of data in a modular fashion, similar to the native directory or file monitoring inputs found in Splunk. We will also cover the KV Store, how to use it, and why to use it. The KV Store allows you to store information in a key-value manner, which has the potential to speed up lookup tables, as the data is stored in the memory. We will also cover how to use Bower, npm, Gulp, and Git as tools for customizing and tracking our apps.