Real-Time Analytics

Real-Time Dashboards from Kafka Data

Connect Kafka to Grafana, Metabase, or any BI tool with sub-second freshness. RisingWave continuously maintains SQL materialized views over your event streams — no Spark, no Flink, no custom consumers.

Start Free Kafka Integration

Sub-Second

Refresh Latency

Materialized views update as Kafka events arrive — dashboards show data from the last 100ms without expensive on-demand aggregations

SQL

Stream Analytics

Define windowed aggregations, running totals, and multi-stream joins using standard SQL — no Spark or Flink cluster required

PostgreSQL

BI Compatibility

Connect Grafana, Metabase, Superset, or any BI tool via the PostgreSQL protocol — no custom connectors needed

Pre-Computed

Query Performance

Dashboard queries read from pre-computed materialized views — sub-millisecond query response time regardless of event volume

Why Real-Time

Why do Kafka-based dashboards need a streaming database?

Polling Kafka directly from a dashboard is expensive and slow. Lambda architectures that mix streaming and batch jobs introduce consistency issues and operational overhead. A streaming database like RisingWave sits between Kafka and your BI tool — continuously pre-computing aggregations so dashboard queries always return in sub-milliseconds, regardless of how fast events arrive.

Factor	Polling / Lambda	RisingWave
Dashboard Freshness	Minutes (polling/lambda)	Sub-second (streaming)
Query Latency	Seconds (on-demand agg)	Sub-millisecond (pre-computed)
Infrastructure	Flink + Kafka + Postgres	Single SQL system
BI Tool Support	Custom connectors needed	Native PostgreSQL protocol

→Eliminate lambda architecture complexity — one SQL system handles both streaming compute and dashboard serving
→Decouple dashboard query latency from event throughput — 10M events/second or 100, dashboards respond the same
→Connect any PostgreSQL-compatible BI tool without custom connectors or middleware
→Define new dashboard metrics in minutes by writing a SQL view, not a Spark job

Use Cases

What kinds of dashboards does RisingWave power?

Any dashboard where data changes faster than a scheduled batch job can keep up. Operational monitoring, business KPIs, IoT telemetry, and security audit dashboards all benefit from sub-second freshness powered by continuous SQL computation over Kafka streams.

Operational Metrics and SLAs

Monitor p99 latency, error rates, and throughput from application event streams in real time — catch SLA breaches seconds after they occur, not minutes later

Business KPI Dashboards

Aggregate revenue, order volume, and conversion metrics from transaction Kafka topics with sub-second freshness, giving operations teams accurate real-time business visibility

IoT and Telemetry Monitoring

Process high-throughput sensor and device events from Kafka using windowed SQL aggregations, computing fleet health metrics and anomaly scores in real time

Log Analytics and Audit Trails

Ingest structured log events from Kafka, compute error frequency, user activity summaries, and security audit metrics continuously for security and compliance dashboards

How It Works

How does RisingWave connect Kafka to real-time dashboards?

RisingWave acts as the computation layer between Kafka and your BI tool. It ingests events from Kafka topics, applies SQL transformations and aggregations continuously, and exposes the results as materialized views through a PostgreSQL-compatible endpoint that Grafana, Metabase, or Superset can query directly.

→Create a Kafka source in RisingWave with a single SQL statement pointing to your topic and broker
→Define metrics as materialized views using standard SQL — windowed aggregations, joins, filters
→Connect Grafana or Metabase using the PostgreSQL data source plugin — point to RisingWave's host and port
→Query materialized views from your dashboard panels — results reflect data ingested within the last 100ms
→Add new metrics without touching infrastructure — write a new SQL view and query it immediately

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I build real-time dashboards from Kafka data?

Does RisingWave work with Grafana for real-time dashboards?

How does RisingWave compare to ksqlDB for real-time dashboards?

How fresh are the dashboard metrics in RisingWave?

Connect Kafka to your dashboards in minutes

Define your metrics in SQL and start serving sub-second dashboard data from Kafka without Spark or Flink.

Start Free