Getting started with demo data

This section refers to using the preloaded demo that can be downloaded or accessed live at www.siren.io/downloads.

Do you want to learn how to load and configure Siren Platform from scratch instead? Then see the Getting Started tutorial.

This demo includes the following preloaded tables (technically indices) in the included Elasticsearch clusters:

company

A collection of companies

article

A collection of articles about companies

investment

A collection of investments in companies

investor

A collection of investors

.siren

Siren Investigate configuration

The demonstration data set was built from a sample of articles that were gathered from tech blogs and from data about companies, investments, and investors in the CrunchBase 2013 Snapshot © 2013 CrunchBase Inc.

Setting up Siren Investigate

  1. Go to www.siren.io/downloads and download the Preloaded demo.

  2. Complete the validation form, accept the license, and click Proceed.

  3. Save the compressed file and extract it to a local directory.

    On macOS, if you are running Catalina or a later version, you must remove an extended file attribute (xattr) before you extract the downloaded ZIP file. Run the following command:

    xattr -d com.apple.quarantine siren-platform-demo-data-*-darwin-x86_64.zip

    The extracted folder contains three main folders:

    • docs: Contains the Siren Platform user guide in both HTML and PDF formats and the release notes.

    • elasticsearch: Contains the self-contained, single-node Siren Enhanced Elasticsearch cluster.

    • siren-investigate: Contains the Siren Investigate front-end application, which can be accessed through a web browser.

  4. Launch the program, based on your operating system:

On Linux or macOS:

  1. Open a Terminal window and change directory to the extracted folder:

    cd {extracted folder}/elasticsearch
  2. Run the following command:

    ./bin/elasticsearch

    The Terminal window shows Elasticsearch messages flowing. Do not close the command window.

  3. Open a new Terminal window and change directory to the extracted folder:

    cd {extracted folder}/siren-investigate
  4. Run the following command:

    ./bin/investigate

On Windows:

  1. Open a command prompt and change directory to the extracted folder:

    cd {extracted folder}
  2. Run the following command. You can also start the application by simply double-clicking on the start.bat file.

    .\start.bat

By default, Siren Investigate runs in the foreground, prints its logs to STDOUT, and can be stopped by pressing Ctrl + C.

The startup process is complete when you see the message “[plugin:graph_browser_vis] Status changed from yellow to green - Initialized” in the log window.

To access Siren Investigate, open a Web browser and navigate to http://localhost:5606.

Username and passwords at login

You can access the demonstration as three different users:

  • sirenadmin has read access to all data indices and can modify the Siren Investigate configuration.

  • sirenuser has read access to all data indices but cannot modify the Siren Investigate configuration.

  • sirennoinvestor has read access to all data indices except investor. The user has no access to the Investors dashboard.

The password for all users is password.

Accessing the dashboards

The left sidebar is used to navigate between apps in Siren Investigate and can be expanded or contracted using the expand contract icon (expand/contract) button at the bottom of the sidebar.

By default, Siren Investigate displays the Articles dashboard. Dashboards can be configured to display multiple visualizations on the documents stored in a specific index or returned by a saved search on an index pattern.

Each dashboard is represented by a tab containing the dashboard title and the number of documents available for visualizations.

articles dashboard

You can quickly search specific articles through the search input in the navigation bar. For example, let’s find all the articles written about wireless or Wi-Fi:

dashboard search bar

We can immediately see that there are 11595 articles about those topics and all the visualizations are refreshed to aggregate data for this subset of articles.

In addition to simple text, queries in the search bar can be written using the Lucene query syntax, or Elasticsearch Query DSL.

Filtering results

Visualizations can be used to create filters. For example, you can see all the articles about wireless or Wi-Fi published by TechCrunch by clicking the TechCrunch slice inside the Articles by Source pie chart visualization.

Pie slice

Dashboard with filter on the slice applied

To switch off a filter, move the mouse pointer over it and click the check box icon. To switch off all the filters applied to the dashboard, click Actions then Disable.

Creating filters with the Relational Navigator

The Relational Navigator visualization enables you to create cross-dashboard filters. For example, from Companies in the dashboard, you can see that there are 470 companies mentioned in TechCrunch articles about _wireless or Wi-Fi.

Relational filter from articles to companies

The relational filter created by clicking the button is displayed in the filter bar, and can be switched off or removed, just like any other filter. Moving the mouse pointer over the filter will display the list of joined indices and their filters:

Relational filter in the filter bar

Relational filters can be accumulated. For example, if you click Investment rounds →, you will see data about the 351 investment rounds related to a subset of 470 companies mentioned in the TechCrunch articles about wireless or Wi-Fi. For more information, see Relational Navigator.