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IBM Streams

IBM Streams

Overview

What is IBM Streams?

A real-time analytics solution that turns fast-moving volumes and varieties into insights. Streams evaluates a broad range of streaming data — unstructured text, video, audio, geospatial and sensor — helping organizations spot opportunities and risks as they happen.Its Eclipse-based, visual…

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Recent Reviews

Streaming Live analysis

9 out of 10
February 14, 2019
Incentivized
IBM Streaming Analytics is being used to analyze real time data. This is limited to the IT Department in analyses of logs and problem …
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Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Popular Features

View all 9 features
  • Visualization Dashboards (5)
    10.0
    100%
  • Data Ingestion from Multiple Data Sources (5)
    9.0
    90%
  • Machine Learning Automation (5)
    9.0
    90%
  • Real-Time Data Analysis (5)
    8.0
    80%
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Pricing

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N/A
Unavailable

What is IBM Streams?

A real-time analytics solution that turns fast-moving volumes and varieties into insights. Streams evaluates a broad range of streaming data — unstructured text, video, audio, geospatial and sensor — helping organizations spot opportunities and risks as they happen. Its Eclipse-based, visual…

Entry-level set up fee?

  • Setup fee optional
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://console.bluemix.net/catalog/ser…

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

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Alternatives Pricing

What is Striim?

Striim is an enterprise-grade platform that offers continuous real-time data ingestion, high-speed in-flight stream processing, and sub-second delivery of data to cloud and on-premises endpoints.

What is Azure Stream Analytics?

Microsoft offers Azure Stream Analytics for IoT and connected devices, supporting real-time analytics and reporting.

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Product Demos

Acquire, Analyze and Act in Real Time with IBM Streams

YouTube
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Features

Streaming Analytics

Streaming Analytics is performing analytic computations on streaming data. Data streams can come from devices, sensors, websites, social media, applications, infrastructure systems, and more.

8.3
Avg 8.1
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Product Details

What is IBM Streams?

A real-time analytics solution that turns fast-moving volumes and varieties into insights. Streams evaluates a broad range of streaming data — unstructured text, video, audio, geospatial and sensor — helping organizations spot opportunities and risks as they happen.

Its Eclipse-based, visual IDE lets solution architects visually build applications or use familiar programming languages like Java™, Scala or Python. Data engineers can connect with virtually any data source — whether structured, unstructured or streaming — and integrate with Hadoop, Spark and other data infrastructures.

Built-in domain analytics — like machine learning, natural language, spatial-temporal, text, and acoustics — create adaptive stream applications.

IBM Streams Integrations

IBM Streams Competitors

IBM Streams Technical Details

Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo
Supported CountriesUnited States, United Kingdom, Australia, Germany
Supported LanguagesEnglish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portugese/Brazil, Spanish, Chinese simplified, Chinese traditional

Frequently Asked Questions

Azure Stream Analytics and Amazon Kinesis are common alternatives for IBM Streams.

Reviewers rate Visualization Dashboards highest, with a score of 10.

The most common users of IBM Streams are from Small Businesses (1-50 employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(62)

Reviews

(1-8 of 8)
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Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I use IBM Streaming Analytics as a data analytics tool for a graduate class for business students in my university's college of business. It is used as a tool to teach big data analysis for data in motion. These students have no prior programming experience. The tool offers a visual programming interface that is very intuitive to learn so the user can focus more on business applications. After only one tutorial session, students are able to use the tool in building an application for monitoring the bike distractions in the city of Chicago using DIVVY datasets. It is a part of a class business project for improving business shares and efficiency for DIVVY.
  • Intuitive Visual Programming Interface
  • Integration with other analytics via Watson Studio
  • Very vibrant user communities for sharing ideas for applications
  • Can use more default settings for some of the parameters
  • Include more tutorials for cross-data analytic services applications
Great for end-user computing so that business professionals can try out different ideas firsthand for proof-of-concept experiments. Can be scaled up later by IT professionals. If you want to use other machine learning tools, IBM streaming is well integrated with other analytic services so that you don't have to leave IBM Watson Studio. Personally, I have not stressed testing real big data applications using this tool.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It is being used by more than one department. Able to look at streaming data and enrich information and store information. It helps with the problem of looking at live data and being able to filter and make calls. Like the ability to be able to read from various sources and be able to write to many as well.
  • It does really well with running a job, provides flexible ways of increasing parallelism, fusion
  • It provides a good number of operators and toolkits
  • It provides being able to use the Streams runtime using Java and Python
  • Exception handling needs improvement, not able to catch exceptions and save data or send to a different flow
  • Would like to see some alerting operators
  • Would like to see some healthcare HL7 related operators
Like the name says, it is good for streaming data and analyzing. It is great to look at tuples at a fast rate, filtering, calling other sources to enrich data, can call APIs, etc. Could do better for ingest use cases, can do better with guaranteed delivery, etc.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Streams was considered for SENS IoT platform for analytics of real time data from mobile phones, WiFi access points and devices in Sensitel SENS platform. We used the on premise version and evaluated the cloud version as well.
  • Query analysis of real time streaming data
  • Filter out events based on time windows
  • Scalability for large scale data, production tested
  • Integration with big data
  • Ability to write complex business rules
  • Interface and packaging
Well suited for:
Healthcare emergency room acute condition onset detection
Machine failure and anomaly detection
John Nguyen | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I am currently working as a Data Analyst for ATG travel group. We are currently moving our database to IBM Cloud. I am using Streaming Analytics to pull the data from the cloud and manipulating the data to answer research questions. Streaming Analytics will also be able to help my company to make dashboards from the data that I will be using.
  • User friendly
  • Works pretty quick
  • Shows how data are transported
  • User interface. Takes time to get used to.
IBM Streaming Analytics is great for big data management.
February 14, 2019

Streaming Live analysis

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
IBM Streaming Analytics is being used to analyze real time data. This is limited to the IT Department in analyses of logs and problem determination, analysis and resolution. Error logs are redirected to a stream of text DISK_ERRx (X, can be 1, 2, 3, or 4). Errors are either temporary or permanent. We are able to address the problem of determining and grouping errors into classes.
  • Streaming is able to perform analytics operations and pattern detection in real time on real-time data from multiple systems or sources.
  • IBM Streams allows for the ability to program and link to IDE for collaboration with other applications
  • Integration with Business Process Automation
  • Cost and platform availability
  • Integration with cognitive decision making and execution
  • Improvement in Graphical user interface
IBM Streaming Analytics is well suited in cases where you have raw live data, the need to check data and react based on selected or identified metrics in a way to either prevent or take appropriate action in the way you would in a workflow process approver, reviewer scenario. Less appropriate for unrelated, random non patterned data
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I used IBM Streams to design a lab at a university used for analyzing streaming data from IoT devices. The students had to implement signal processing algorithms using the IBM Streams API.
  • Easy to integrate with other IBM cloud services.
  • Fairly simple API with essential functions, not overly complicated.
  • The system seems reliable and has high performance.
  • Python API available.
  • Documentation could be more extensive, with more examples, although overall this is not too bad compared to some of the alternative solutions.
  • Seems expensive to use in production.
Well suited to process data streams, especially if collected via other IBM services such as IBM IoT.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Clusterization and compaction of customer data; used mainly by the department responsible for data preprocessing before further analysis.
  • Analyzing geospatial data
  • Online application support
  • Application hosting and management
  • Documentation can be improved
  • Integration of the foreign languages could be handier.
Well suited for distributed development and streaming data analysis if the tools provided are sufficient for the need of the developers.

Less appropriate - analysis of static data, complex analysis that is not covered by IBM tools, and security-sensitive data analysis.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
IBM Streams allows me to solve problems for my clients that would be difficult, impossible, or too expensive to do with other technologies. Most of the applications areas for which I have been applying it have been real-time in nature with a requirement for low end-to-end latency. Lately, a common use case has been to use Streams to ingest and transform incoming events into a form more suitable for storing for subsequent long-term analysis such as model training. For example, ingesting complex nested JSON documents and transforming and enriching that data into a flattened columnar format to be persisted in Spark, Event Store, Parquet files, etc. With this pattern, Streams is one element in an overall data processing pipeline where multiple technologies are optimally employed to do what they do best. Some of the features provided by the IBM Streams platform are particularly well suited for implementing dynamic microservices than can quickly be developed and deployed to provide valuable agility for evolving problem spaces.
  • IBM Streams is well suited for providing wire-speed real-time end-to-end processing with sub-millisecond latency.
  • Streams is amazingly computationally efficient. In other words, you can typically do much more processing with a given amount of hardware than other technologies. In a recent linear-road benchmark Streams based application was able to provide greater capability than the Hadoop-based implementation using 10x less hardware. So even when latency isn't critical, using Streams might still make sense for reducing operational cost.
  • Streams comes out of the box with a large and comprehensive set of tested and optimized toolkits. Leveraging these toolkits not only reduces the development time and cost but also helps reduce project risk by eliminating the need for custom code which likely has not seen as much time in test or production.
  • In addition to the out of the box toolkits, there is an active developer community contributing additional specialized packages.
  • Although there is support for developing Streams application in Python and Java as well as a visual programming interface. In order to get the absolute most out of the platform IMO it's still best to develop applications using proprietary SPL (Stream Programming Language). Although SPL is a very effective language for stream processing it does present a barrier to entry that will be avoided with the updated visual development tools which being worked on.
Streams is a good fit for situations requiring low end-to-end latency, have complex real-time analytical processing needs on large fast data, or where the reduction of operational costs is important. However, it is very much a data-in-motion technology and not well suited for situations such as some forms of machine learning where the entire historical data set needs to be operated on. Note that it's fairly common to use Streams to perform online scoring using models that were trained offline using other technologies.
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