Inspired by a low flying aircraft that kept waking his cat in the morning, Simon Aubury decided to use an RTL-SDR and ADS-B tracking software dump1090 to determine which plane was the culprit. This is all now standard stuff, however, Simon's software implementation and management of the received ADS-B data is quite unique, as he uses Apache Kafka, KSQL and Kibana as his tools for processing and visualizing the ADS-B data.
Apache Kafka is a 'distributed streaming platform', and KSQL enables real time processing of the data from Kafka. Kibana is a data visualization tool. Essentially these technologies are just ways to manage, process and digest in a human readable way large amounts of real time data coming into a database.
So with some clever database coding Simon was able to create a constantly updating dashboard in Kibana that plots aircraft positional heat maps, displays data such as spotted airlines and destination frequencies in a text cloud, and displays aircraft height data in a line graph. Finally using a database lookup and his gathered data Simon was able to determine that an A380 aircraft flying over his house was waking his cat in the morning.
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