I'm looking for a service (or gem) that will enable me to create a track software-produced business metrics. I should clarify what I'm looking for, because this might be me failing at articulating what I'm looking for in Google. Basically, based on the context of my software, I want to be able to emit certain values and then have them accumulate as metrics. These are not performance or request metrics, per se, and certainly not code-quality metrics.
The quintessential use case is: suppose I have an if / else block in my code, I'd like to publish a metric that tells me how often I choose the true block vs the false block.
Or, suppose I'm using delayed_job, I'd like to publish how often jobs run and how many are in the queue on each run.
I can find all the metrics I want in code, I'm just not sure where to put them right now.
AWS cloudwatch has an api to publish your own metrics. New Relic does, too. However, both look expensive and give me a whole lots I'm not looking for (all the host metrics and code profiling).
Are there other services out that that offer this kind of functionality?
There are actually a couple of services that offer this functionality. My company's product, Instrumental sounds like it might be a great fit for you - we've got a Ruby client as well as some extra tools for measuring system level stuff among other things.
If you're up for hosting your own stats collecting services, many people use the Graphite/Statsd combination; it takes a bit to set up and maintain, but it can definitely accomplish what you're looking to do here as well.
If I understood you right, you're looking for some form of event tracking (as in, how often a part of your code gets used as opposed to another part). If that's right, you might want to give Mixpanel a look.
You should see NewRelic (APM or Insights modules) or Microsoft Insights, they allow you to create custom metrics (business metrics) inside your source code and monitor them online using dashboards.
Related
I know that the question seems odd, but I'll try to explain it as well as I can.
I have a docker-compose file with 4 services: zookeeper, kafka, schema registry and redis. Besides that, I also have 2 SpringBoot microservices which use the dockerized services. The first microservice receives HTTP requests from Postman and then processes those requests before sending them to a topic. The second microservice reads from that topic, processes the messages and sends them to, you've guessed it, another topic.
How would a UML use-case diagram for this situation look like? I have no idea how to start because I've always identified roles first and took it from there. In this case, there are no people actually using it because it's just meant to collect some data and manipulate it.
My professor told me I had to have a use-case diagram, so I suppose it has to be possible to draw it, I'm just confused in how to start.
Also, if you have any recommendations on which diagrams can explain microservices nicely, let me know.
You are already focusing on a technical solution, i.e. how should it work. You have described here in details a system made of several microservices, and using some identified technologies for their implementation.
But the systems have a purpose. They are meant to interact with some actors and help themto achieve some goals. This is what use-cases are about: what's the purpose of the system for which actor. And whether it’s 12 microservices or 1 monolith, does absolutely not influence the use-cases, since these are independent of the inner structure of the system.
Unfortunately, nothing in the narrative tells us what this system is supposed to to nor for whom. This is where you should start.
Finally actors of the UC diagram can be human users or technical systems (i.e. independent systems).
You can use feature in use case diagram called include. Basically, include means a use-case will call other specific use-case. (see https://www.uml-diagrams.org/use-case-diagrams.html for reference). If you have chain of activity on multiple microservices, you can connect them using include like so:
Note that use case diagram doesn't care about technology used to build an app. It doesn't care what's under the include between your services. It was intended as pure abstraction to allow non-developers to understand it.
I have recently been tasked to look into Workflow Foundation. The actual goal would be to implement a system in which the end users can define custom workflows in the deployed application (and of course, use them). Personally I have never used WF before (and reading around here on SO people are very doubtful about it - so am I reading those questions/answers), and I am having a hard time finding my way around it given the sparse learning resources available.
Anyway, there are some questions, for example, this, which mention something they call dynamic or user-defined workflows. They point out that WF makes it possible to "rehost" the designer, so that end-users can define their own new workflows after the application is deployed (without developer intervention (?), this is the part I am not really sure about).
I have been told by fellow employees that this way we could implement an application in which once this feature is implemented we would no longer have to keep modifying the application every time a new workflow is to be implemented. However, they also pointed out that they just "heard it", they don't have firsthand experience themselves either.
I have been looking around for samples online but the best thing I could find was a number guess app - barely more than a simple hello world. So not much that would point me to the right direction of how this user-defined workflow feature actually works and how it can be used, what its limitations are etc.
My primary concern is this: it is alright that one can define custom workflows but no workflow is worth a penny without the possibility of actually inputting data throughout the process. For example, even if the only thing I need to do is to register a customer in a complaint management system, I would need the customer's name, contact, etc. If the end user should be able to define any workflow the given toolset makes possible then of course there needs to be a way to provide the workflow consumers with a way of inputting data through forms. If the workflow can be of pretty much any nature then so needs to be the data - otherwise if we need to implement the UIs ourselves then this "end-user throws together a workflow" feature is kind of useless because they would still end up at us requiring to implement a form or some sort of data input for the individual steps.
So I guess that there should be a way of defining the "shape" of the data that needs to be filled at any given user interaction phase of the workflow which I can investigate and dynamically generate forms based on the data. So for example, if I found that the required data was made up of a name and a date of birth, then I would need to render a textbox and a datepicker on the page.
What I couldn't really figure out from the Q&As here and elsewhere is whether this is even possible. Can I define and then later "query" the structure of the data to be passed to the workflow at any point? If so, how? If not, how should this user-defined workflow feature even be used, what is it good for?
To clarify it a little, I could imagine something as specifying a complex type, which would be the view model (input model) in a regular MVC app, and then I could reflect over it, get the properties and render input fields based on that.
Windows Workflow Foundation is about machine workflows, not business workflows. True, it is the foundational tool set Microsoft created for building their business workflow products. But out of the box WWF does not have the components you need to quickly and easily build business workflows. If you want to send an email in a workflow, you have to write that from scratch. Just about anything you can think of doing from a business point of view you have to write from scratch.
If you want to easily create business workflows using Microsoft products check out the workflow stuff in SharePoint. It is the easiest of the Microsoft products to work with (in my experience.) If that does not meet your needs there are other products like BizTalk.
K2 is another company with a business workflow product that uses WWF as their base to more easily build business workflows, the older K2 products actually create web pages automatically to collect the data from the user.
WWF is very low level, arguably it lost traction after they re-wrote the whole thing in 4.0. While not publically stated by Microsoft, my personal opinion is Service Fabric (from Microsoft) achieves the goals WWF originally tried to solve which was a "more robust programming environment."
I have a few apps written in ruby on rails and like any good developer I want high quality data about my site, such as measuring the number of new user accounts per day. I'm in the process of writing my own analytics tools, but I feel like i'm re-inventing the wheel. Are there any plugins or gems that could help me pull this data and display it quickly (graphs are a plus)?
If not, what types of features would you want in such a tool (i'll put a plugin on github if my code is good enough)?
Update:
To clarify a bit, i'm looking for business level-analytics. I already use google-analytics for my site traffic, and active-scaffold to get an admin page, right now my application has users which generate tickets and can create surveys, i'm interested in general trends in my application and by graphing new & existing user numbers versus new tickets and new surveys i can get the info that I want. I like to get general numbers, so i'm pulling all the users for the last 30 days, and then iterating over them to count how many i get per day...then i'm saving that to an array and plotting versus tickets, etc. Right i'm doing this using a home brew library which isn't very efficient, and before I put time/energy into making it better I want to make sure i'm not duplicating an existing set of tools. Or writing un-needed code.
If you post how you personally do this, and the answer is at least intelligible i'll be happy to give you a karma bump for your time.
You have three options that are all fairly easy to implement:
Google Analytics
Just include a small javascript snippet in the footer of your page and you get meaningful data about your hits/traffic. This is extremely easy, and will provide traffic information, but nothing about the internal workings about your applications.
New Relic: RPM
New Relic RPM is a service that comes in the form of a plugin. There is a free version, which gives you a (useful) taste of the features it can provide. This plugin will give you hardcore rails analytics. It will tell you what percentage of a request to a controller is spent in the model, in the view, etc. It will tell you how long each SQL call takes. This is great for optimizing your application.
ActiveScaffold
While not in and of itself an administrative tool, ActiveScaffold fits the bill quite nicely. Just create an admin namespace and create ActiveScaffolds for all your models/resources. This lets you see the data in an easy to use way, get simple counts of your rows (to see how many users you have, for example). This is a very easy setup, with little overhead.
Edit to reply to the OP Edit
There are no gems/plugins that I'm aware of that provide business-level analytics that you seem to want, as they are specialized associations between models that can't be predicted. The best bet, in my opinion, would be to roll your own solution that provides the data you want.
Probably the easiest way is to stick with good ol' Google Analytics. I'm pretty sure there are tools for more specific needs, but for general purpose analytics they are probably the best.
I know there is a lot of talk about BPM these days and I am conscious that some may see it to be a craze rather than a fundamentally important piece of software.
As someone from what most would call 'The Business', I have been doing my best to learn about BPM to ensure we continue to make decisions that not only make sense to the business, but IT as well.
I have noticed while reading that mention is made to application workflow when sometimes discussing BPM. I hadn't given this much thought until recently.
Therefore, what is the difference? When would you use one and not the other?
BPM is about the process and improving it, which takes into account users and potentially more than one application,e.g. an ERP system may have more than one application to it, though there may be other uses of the term. Note that the process could be viewed without what applications or technologies are used.
Application workflow is how an application is used to go from a to b. Here it is a specific set of code that is used and what happens over the course of an application getting from a to b. In this case, the application is front and center rather than the process.
Does that provide an answer? Another way to think of it is that multiple application workflows can make up a system which is used in a process that can have BPM applied to it.
Late to the game, but workflow is to database as BPMS is to DBMS. (Convenient how the letters line up, huh?)
IOW, BPM(S) is traditionally meant to refer to a particular framework/application that allows you to manage business processes: defining them, storing them, versioning them, measuring them, etc. This is similar to how a DBMS manages databases.
Now, a workflow is a definition, much like a database is a definition. In the former case, it is a definition of operations/work (Fufill Order), steps thereof (Send Invoice) and rules/constraints on the work (If no stock, send notice). In the latter, similar case, it is a definition of data structure (CREATE TABLE) and constraints (InvoiceTotal must be > $0.00).
I think this is a potentially confusing subject, particular as some development environments use a type of process flow model to generate user facing applications (I'm thinking about Outsystems here, for example).
But, for me, the distinction is crystal clear. Application workflow, as people talk about it, refers to a user's path through an application, i.e. the pages they complete/visit, the data they enter, etc. on their way to completing a transaction of some sort. Application orkflow is a poor term for this though, I think application flow would be more meaningful.
BPM on other hand, is about modelling and executing a workflow process. By workflow, in this context, I mean a series of discrete steps (or tasks) that have to be completed (either programmatically or via human interaction) in a certain order to complete a process. These tasks can be implemented as individual application modules (each with their own "application workflow", see above). The job of the workflow engine is to make sure that these separate steps are assigned to the right people (of groups of people) in the right sequence, and that overall the process completes in an orderly way.
I don't think there's a clear answer to this at all. These are words, as opposed to theoretical concepts. If you add the word "checklist" into the mix - that just turns out to be a linear version of a process (but you can have conditionals in checklists - making them a workflow).
I am not sure how to help in reframing this question, but it's almost as if no answer can ever be possible. My own thoughts are at https://tallyfy.com/improving-efficiency-workflow-vs-business-process-management/
I've been looking for a good testing framework for months, not finding anything, so I've just been building my own.
This is what I want to do:
- track arbitrary behaviors (e.g. # of photos viewed, # of comments posted)
- track correlation between arbitrary variables and those behaviors
(e.g, how do different versions of this prompt affect average # of photos viewed?)
This kind of thing should be a core part of agile development. What's out there? I know Google Website Optimizer is one of the answers, but you can only track behaviors that end in a single "success" page.
It'd be great to have a plugin that can work within your code (Rails in my case) and feed into a nice hosted service with pretty graphs...
You may want to partition your problem into analytics (impressions, actions, and possible in-page events, reporting of your tests), and a framework for serving up your variations (how do you manage x variations both in practical terms of preparing them, do you need to store variations for future reference, turning on and off tests, optimize the effectiveness of your test etc). There is clearly an overlap, say, Google Website Optimizer can turn off a bad variation as soon as it has data to support it, but by thinking about this as different problems you may be able to reuse perhaps the Google Analytics component.
Yep, here:
http://github.com/paulmars/seven_minute_abs/tree/master