External data and content

Very quickly, we will mention ways to pull in additional data from external sources. These can be external data sources, or more likely, internal API calls to internal services.

Data

Say you have an internal monitoring solution that has an API. Since you want to be efficient in both the collection of data and the storage of data, you only want to collect and store the performance data in the internal monitoring solution. However, how can you integrate the two? Simply put, you can build a script input that consumes the API data and stores the resulting performance data in a lookup that you can use to automatically enhance the data. You can also use jQuery to pull that data right into the dashboard, and use the D3 visualizations as well as the built-in JavaScript objects to visualize it. This is done quite simply by using the Ajax library of jQuery.

$.ajax({
  url: "http://myinternalserver.example.com/getNode/myNode"
})
  .done(function( data ) {
    if ( console &...