Release of the Solace Sunburst Topic Explorer!

General Discussions
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:megaphone: Hello Community!! I’m very excited to finally announce the release of the Sunburst Topic Explorer, a visual tool for exploring the real-time runtime metrics and construction of your Solace topic hierarchy..! :tada: https://explorer.solace.dev

2025-04-24T16-41-35
2025-04-24T16-41-351452×687 162 KB

This tool started as a Solace User Group demo that I made back in 2019 in Singapore. Customers loved it and we decided to build it into our Event Portal v1. It didn’t look that pretty, had performance issues at scale, and couldn’t listen to real-time topics (you had to scan first with a Java app, and then import the scanned file). If you’ve never seen it, here’s an old copy: Aaron's Solace Topic Hierarchy Explorer

What are you are seeing is a visualization of a tree data structure, generated by listening to all the messages being published on a Solace broker, extracting the topics, and splitting by topic level /. You can navigate around by clicking on arcs to zoom in, the centre to zoom back out, and topic-specific metrics are updated in the upper-left to give you an idea of message volumes.

I even made a video about it! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWUbkN1z54Y

During the pandemic, I spent a lot of free time rewriting it to allow real-time data via our JavaScript API using WebSockets to be loaded in continuously. Rearchitected the whole thing into front-end (GUI) and back-end (Web Worker) threads, improved the topic tree data structure, and changed how the HTML DOM got updated. (Fun fact: in JavaScript you postMessage() and onMessage() between threads, very event-driven!)

Anyhow, we have decided to release this tool “for free” via our Developer Advocates’ solace.dev site. There’s still some features not quite done yet that I’d like to add shortly (import, example scans, MQTT), and if you have any suggestions please comment in this thread! :folded_hands:t3:

So..! :collision: Without further ado: please head over to https://explorer.solace.dev and check it out! :backhand_index_pointing_left:t3:

And if you need some test data published into your broker, head over to https://feeds.solace.dev for a variety of simulated Event Feeds, a tool made by my colleagues @giri and @Tamimi

Thanks for checking it out! Let me know if you have questions..!

6 Likes
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This is a very useful tool to use. It gives a lot of insight in the usage of the topic structure. Drilling down is simple by clicking at the area of interest. This is definitely a tool to recommend for users!
A nice improvement would be if you could save and load connection information, but I bet it is already on the list of extensions :slightly_smiling_face: