Create an external source

At this point, you have completed the Quickstart, and you have an external program sending data into Quix, and it is writing into a topic.

However, you can't currently see this in the Pipeline view. To help you visualize what you've created, you add an external source component, to provide a visual entity in the pipeline view.

Watch a video on adding an external source

Transcript

0:01 Welcome back to another video. In this video I'll show you how to improve your pipeline view by creating an external source.

0:11 So let's go straight into it. The easiest way to do this, there's various ways that you can do this, but as you see there is a nice big box here, add external source, you can just click on that.

0:28 The reason that I'm adding an external source is because my command line program that's capturing CPU load and publishing that into Quix is external to the Quix and environment.

0:42 You'll see other examples where we use Quix's built-in code samples and connectors to build your pipeline, but they're internal to Quix, so you just use an ordinary source.

0:57 So for our purposes here, we're going to create an example. External source. I'm going to call it server load, CPU load.

1:10 You can call it anything you like really, as long as it makes sense to you. We also need to select the output topic.

1:21 Well, we know the topic is CPU load because it's the only one we've got So let's go ahead and add that source now we can see The external source appears in the pipeline view And then later in the quick stall we're going to extend this pipeline So in the second part of the tour you'll add a transformation

1:44 here and then when that's done on the other side of the transformation you'll create a destination to complete the pipeline.

1:56 Okay that's it for this video thanks for watching and see you in the next video.

How to add an external source

To add an external source:

1. Click on Code Samples.
2. Select the Source, and Basic templates filters.
3. On the External Source sample, click Add external source.
4. Give the component a name, such as "Laptop CPU Load".
5. For output topic select cpu-load.
6. Click Add external source.

This now appears in the pipeline view as a reminder (visual cue) as to the nature of the source generating the data for this topic.

🏃‍♀️ Next step

Build a transform service to process your data!

2. Process your data