IBM InfoSphere BigInsights [EOL] Reviews

InfoSphere Streams was the one core product from the platform in which we were using. We were building a real-time response system and we built it on InfoSphere Streams.

The solution we built using InfoSphere was mainly aiming to: 

• Collect telematics data from vehicle engines.
• Do root cause analysis (RCA) on any engine failure. 
• Give recommendations to the customer and the service center, in real time.

This helped us to serve our customers better by giving real-time suggestions and proactive maintenance. Also, our engineering team was able to figure out frequent faults and incorporate design changes to avoid them in future.

• The UI was not interactive: Responses used to be very slow and hang up at times.
• The UI was not really helping to track the real-time jobs and its logs.
• You can bring in a better UI for job management and health checks.
• Developer API documentation needs improvement.

Two years.

• Real-time reading from ports was trouble. We used to miss a lot of data as the streams read from the port batch-by-batch and missed anything coming in-between. There was no document or logs on this.
• We needed to write custom java operator for anything other than the basic functions, e.g., pushing to a webservice.
• We faced some sync up problems between the streams at times.

Upgrading to BigInsights 4.0 had some issues. IBM's support team was onboarded for help.

The things that I have found of value are those that make database management easier to deal with. I have been using Netezza and Oracle DBA for several years so the big data is a bit of a mind shift for me. The thing that I have found most valuable in this solution is the BIQSQL implementation which is fully SQL ANSI compliant. No retraining is required on the SQL front.

The customer that I am working with has had a portion of the database that they will be shifting from Netezza to BigInsights. This will remove all of the queries and overhead on Netezza around those tables. This will be a big improvement and will allow the organization to deal with backup/recovery better as it decreases the size of the Netezza database.

I have found a lot of issues in Fluid Query and BigInsights Applications to move data in the enterprise version. I have several tickets on these with IBM as they need to be addressed to have a solid implementation. Fortunately none of these are stopping the implementation of BigInsights.

Ambari integration with GPFS monitoring is non-existant. We had network issues which caused GPFS to require recovery. We had no notice from Ambari.

MTR for GPFS took several days with only 30% of space in use. In order for this to be more production ready IBM needs to make this better. Way too long.

I have been using BigInsights for six months now. I have had training on it using the VM about three months ago. This implementation uses GPFS instead of HPFS. This is IBM’s answer to a more stable and fault tolerant file system.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

None

Ticket resolution has been very slow and support is confused on how to resolve some interface issues.

We had some tables previously in Netezza. We are moving some out to decrease the overhead and overall space consumption.

The implementation was done and coordinated by Sirius/Brightlight Consulting.

If you are getting BigInsights definitely get BIGSQL option as it is worth it.

We evaluated primarily the Text analytics module for social media analysis.

This feature has been looked at for social media analysis esp sentiment analysis by the marketing groups trying to understand product/service feedback on social media

At the time when we tried this product (six months ago), there was lack of technical depth within IBM to support with queries. The service was used from the Bluemix platform and that was also undergoing several changes by the day. We had issues of lockout, service had to be re-configured etc which was more a problem of Bluemix platform stabilizing I think.

We were trying to use the IBM Accelerator for Social Data Analytics that came as part of BigInsights. Initially we tried this with a trial version in our local environment but later for customer POC wanted to move to Bluemix platform. Bluemix at that time offered BigInsights as a service. The interface did not have much of documentation to configure and debug. Later we used a combination of JAQL scripts and BigSheets to do some basic analysis. The Bluemix platform was changing with new services getting added every day and the site also changing. We used to get mails asking us to back up the data else we could lose it as services were re-published.

In essence, the approach IBM took to simplify social media analytics through accelerators was brilliant. Unfortunately the stability of the platform was an issue. Haven't worked on Bluemix recently but presume things will be more stable now. I did see lot more documentation when I searched for this accelerator few days ago.

We have evaluated used some of the BigInsights technology for our customers' proof-of-concept/protoyping exercises.

Definitely a product worth evaluating, esp if you are an IBM shop and if done on Bluemix, it gives a jump start on protoypes/POCs.

The enterprise-ready technologies and capabilities for text analytic and big data analytic. The easy way to deploy big data solutions into production is a very desirable feature of this product.

I led a project in which my company deployed a big data solution in less than four month with a Hadoop cluster of more than 100 datanodes and 3 namenodes to perform big data analytic from datasets extracted of several data sources such as social networks, RFID sensors and other type of sensors.

I have discovered most of the features I need in the version 4.0 of this product, but there is always room for improvements, such as getting better performance on Windows based platform and including compatibility with the new frameworks and technologies related to Hadoop ecosystem.

I have been using it since September 2014.

I encountered issues with having the appropriate documentation resources, as well as getting the right stability when explored virtualized environments based on Virtualbox and HyperV software.

The customer service is very reliable and efficient, I would rate it as 8/10.

Technical support is very reliable and efficient, I would rate it as 8/10.

I previously tried the official Apache Hadoop project and the Apache Spark engine, but based on my personal experience I decided to choose an enterprise-ready platform to deploy my production environment, so I could get access to better technical documentation and a more qualified customer service.

It was complex from a technical point of view, since I didn't have the experience nor the expertise to work in this type of project.

I chose the in-house implementation, mostly because I had a budget limitation in my company. I did get very valuable advice from IBM customer service and the active Hadoop community which facilitated open-source tools and tips for similar implementations.

I got almost a 40% ROI which is wonderful. I recommend to think about an enterprise licensing approach depending on how big the project is and its complexity. For small implementations I rather would use 100% open-source tools to reduce the pricing of the desirable solution.

This is a very helpful product, with continuous improvements by IBM and a great customer service which enables easy access to valuable information for both Hadoop developers and system administrators.

Please examine all the tools available on the market, especially the Apache Hadoop project and the Apache Spark engine. The IBM InfoSphere BigInsights product has a educational version, which is great to understand how it works and the flexibility, scalability and maintainability of this product. I have implemented my initial setup in this community version of the BigInsights product, and it worked great for me.

Watson is the perfect engine for text analysis for us, but in 2014 it doesn’t support the Russian language.

We didn’t use these products in production environment. For test only.

I’d like to see Russian language in supported languages for Watson.

I've used it for four months.

No I did’t. These products has a good documentation for installation and support.

IBM support tried to help us very quickly, but we have very difficult environment. This factor was constrain time for resolve the problem

We used Cloudera and Hortonworks. Now we work with Hortonworks because it free for production environment over 100 machines.

I did’t have any problems with installation. I installed IBMIM and connected into it some repositories with solution. Next installation with console wizard was very simple.

For our business customer pricing is very important motivation, so I can advise change licensing policy from “by volume in the cluster” to “number of machines in the cluster”. If it possible, sure.

It integrates with JSqsh, enabling us to submit long-running exports from the shell. Also, the automated user acceptance testing suite is extremely useful as we can follow through the state of UAT process.

It enabled us to process low-level detailed transactional data that previously was not processed.

I'd like to see faster execution time, especially for simple queries that don't touch on many rows and don't involve many operations (Joins, Unions, Groupbys).

I used if for six months mainly for enriching our other data sources with data extracted from BigInsights. Thus my use case was exporting Big SQL queries that include joining into flat files and doing the UAT of the product.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

8/10 - when they could not help was mainly due to resource limitations or missing data.

I don't know, initial setup was not done by me.

Implemented by IBM.

Didn't evaluate another solution, BigInsights was already in use in the company.

You should evaluate other analytics-on-Hadoop solutions too, and convince yourself that your choice will deliver the best value for money.

You should verify and double-verify test cases before proceeding with UAT. Ask yourself, are the cases really testing what you want the solution to deliver?

BigSQL – implementation of DB2 Database Partitioning Feature on HDFS cluster – in conjunction with IBM Fluid Query for Netezza.

It gives us the option of extending our analytics system. Now, a customer can move part of their data from Netezza into a Hadoop cluster. What's more, they can run algorithms directly on HDFS using R.

Installation process should be improved for IBM ValueAdd components, especially scripts for R/BigR installation. They could add Hue and Ranger to the set of services.

I've used it for three months.

Deployment of BigR is problematic as the services have to be installed on whole clusters. Some elements are not clearly described in documentation, and they are split into a few topics in InfoCenter.

Great. We have direct support from IBM Poland pre-sales and lab teams.

I have implemented integration processes on HortonWorks and Cloudera. The product was chosen by our customer due to Fluid Query implementation.

Initial setup is rather complex in comparison with Cloudera.

I have implemented the cluster for our customer with IBM support.

IBM provides a PVU model for licensing. What is more, a five-node cluster is added for various products such as IBM Information Server.