Deployment architecture

Let’s first understand where qbo insights sits within a typical enterprise data and analytics architecture and how it provides data to the end users. The figure below depicts a typical qbo insights deployment set up.

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qbo insights sits between the end user and the databases holding the desired data. It essentially processes natural language queries coming from the user, translates them into one or more SQL queries going to the databases, performs additional analytics as needed, and presents the results back to the user in a meaningful way.

Users interact with qbo via channels

Channels supported

Currently, qbo insights supports the following channels

  • Web

  • Mobile Web (including a progressive web app)

  • Slack

  • Teams

In each case,users can interact with a qbo bot by asking queries in natural language. The Web and Mobile Web interfaces have additional capabilities like displaying auto-completions to aid query formulation, and creating and visualizing boards containing charts.

On the other side of qbo insights are the data sources. qbo insights connects to the databases through ODBC connections. qbo insights currently supports a few different kinds of databases and big data systems.

qbo insights itself can run on a single Linux server. It currently supports RHEL or CentOS 7. qbo insights includes an application & analytics server that interacts with users and the backend data sources. It also includes a MariaDB database server where it stores information about users, conversations and other configurations.

qbo insights can be configured to work behind a web proxy like nginx, which allows it to expose an HTTPS endpoint to different channels. The web proxy can run on the same server as the qbo application and analytics server or on a separate machine.

It can run either in a single machine configuration where both the application & analytics server, and the database server run in the same machine. Alternatively, the two can run in separate machines as well.

qbo insights supports various authentication mechanisms. This includes an internal username-password repository, or connection to external systems via LDAP, such as Active Directory.

In the next sections, we will go over the software dependencies that must be satisfied prior to the installation of Unscrambl qbo insights.