What is binjr?

binjr is a time series browser; it renders time series data produced by other applications as dynamically editable representations and provides advanced features to navigate the data smoothly and efficiently (drag & drop, zoom, history, detachable tabs, advanced time-range picker).

It is a standalone client application, that runs independently of the applications that produce the data; there are no server or server-side components dedicated to binjr that need to be installed on the source.

The user experience in binjr revolves around enabling users to compose a custom view by using any of the time-series exposed by the source, simply by dragging and dropping them on the view.
That view then constantly evolves as users add or remove series from different sources, while navigating through it by changing the time range, the type of chart visualization and smaller aspects such as the color or transparency for each series.
Users can navigate the change history for these views, using “back” and “forward” like in a web browser, and save the current state of their session at any time to a file, in order to reopen it later or to share it with someone else.

binjr also possesses the ability to visualize time series not only as charts of numeric values, but can be customized to support visualization for any data type; for instance it features out-of-the-box a source adapter for text based log files.

Log files, produced by applications to trace their lifecycle at runtime, typically contain timestamps for each event they contain; so we can think of them as time series, but with data points being textual information instead of numerical values.
In practical terms, this means that a lot of the features built into binjr to compose and navigate time series visualizations can be applied to log files with great benefits.

Behind the scene, binjr uses Apache Lucene to index data from log files; meaning users can use its powerful query language to hack through vast quantities logged events.
It also allows binjr to open log files of any size; unlike most text editors which will fail to load multi gigabytes-sized files as they try to fit it all in memory, binjr will happily index those and present a paginated view so that memory usage remains reasonable, while the backing index ensures that searches are fast and navigation snappy.

With these abilities, binjr aims to become the missing link between text editors and command line tools traditionally used to analyse monitoring data locally and full-blown log analytics platforms (e.g. Elastic/Logstash/Kibana stack) that centralizes logs for entire organizations.
It provides many of the same powerful visualization and search features while still remaining a totally local solution (the data never needs to be pushed to the cloud - or anywhere else for that matter), and requiring no setup nor maintenance to speak of.

…and what it isn’t!

• binjr is not a system performance collector, nor a collector of anything else for that matter. What it provides is efficient navigation and pretty presentation for time series collected elsewhere.
• binjr is not a cloud solution. It’s not even a server based solution; it’s entirely a client application, albeit one that can get its data from remote servers. Think of it as a browser, only just for time series.
• binjr is not a live system monitoring dashboard. While you can use it to connect to live sources, its feature set is not geared toward that particular task, and there are better tools for that out there. Instead, it aims to be an investigation tool, for when you don’t necessarily know what you’re looking for beforehand and you’ll want to build and change the view of the data as you navigate through it rather than be constrained by pre-determined dashboards.