749604 - Create analytics module to gather and send front-end and user analytics data

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

Description

[Sam Foster [:sfoster]]

We need a simple mechanism to gather analytics data that is only available in the front-end, and have that sent back to the server. 

It should buffer or queue up requests so we don't have one request per data-point which would likely perform horribly.

Comment 1

[Sam Foster [:sfoster]]

I've made a start on this in the frontend-analytics branch. 
I'm porting the dojox.analytics module from Dojo which I've used before and does all this. 
So far I've got the core functionality which queues up data and periodically flushes to the server. There's a few plugins for gathering specific analytics stuff that I might also port - like an idle/active plugin, window/client plugin etc.

Comment 2

[Sam Foster [:sfoster]]

modules and tests written and the loadtime functionality wired into main-bb in: https://bitbucket.org/mozillapancake/pancake/changeset/4ad0ed40306f

..that gathers load-time data and ends up making a request to /api/analytics with body like: 

{"id":1,"data":[{"loadtime.start":1335974050202,"loadtime.end":1335974064633,"loadtime.elapsed":14431}],"csrf_token":"0ad1b3453d3d936f3adb9a2437cbb4f6705583df"}

Not sure where the data should ultimately be sent, but this looks complete as far as the front-end goes. Holding off merging into default until there's an endpoint to receive it.

Comment 3

[Sam Foster [:sfoster]]

I merged this to default and closed the frontend-analytics branch. When /main finishes loading and initialization, a POST to config.analyticsUrl is made with the loadtime analytics data.

Comment 4

[Olivier Yiptong [:oyiptong]]

Please send data in the format below to: /lattice/stats

[
 {
   "js.loadtime": {
      "timestamp": 1339639106845,
      "elapsed" : 1590
   }
 },
 ...,
 {..}
]

There will be a whitelist for allowed 'buckets'.

Comment 5

[Olivier Yiptong [:oyiptong]]

{'data': [
...
]}

Might be better actually

Comment 6

[Olivier Yiptong [:oyiptong]]

API implemented.

Sample curl command:

curl -v -X POST -d '{"data":[{"js.loadtime":{"timestamp": 1339639106845, "elapsed":1590}}]}' 'http://localhost:6543/lattice/stats'

Comment 7

[Sam Foster [:sfoster]]

Fixed in: https://bitbucket.org/mozillapancake/pancake/changeset/0ede7a6aa9f8