Simple Metrics Tutorial Part 1: Metrics Collection

The IBM Cloud Data Services Developer Advocacy team built this lightweight web-tracking app to record user actions on our site’s AJAX-enabled search engine page. Follow the tutorial and learn how we use the open source Piwik® web analytics app to collect information and Node.js® to store that data in Cloudant. Then try it yourself by implementing tracking on a demo app we provide. Here in Part 1, we focus on data collection. When you’re done, you can try Part 2, where we show how to visualize the data you’ve gathered.

##How it works

Here’s an architectural overview of our metrics collector. Its middleware component lives on IBM Bluemix (IBM’s open cloud platform for building, running, and managing applications) and serves tracker.js and piwik.js, which perform the metrics collection work and persist metrics data to the database. We use Cloudant as our database, a NoSQL JSON document store based on Apache CouchDB™.

Deploy to IBM Bluemix

###One-Click Deployment

The fastest way to deploy this application to Bluemix is to click this Deploy to Bluemix button. Or, if you prefer working from the command line, skip to the Deploy Manually section.

Don't have a Bluemix account? If you haven't already, you'll be prompted to sign up for a Bluemix account when you click the button. Sign up, verify your email address, then return here and click the the Deploy to Bluemix button again. Your new credentials let you deploy to the platform and also to code online with Bluemix and Git. If you have questions about working in Bluemix, find answers in the Bluemix Docs.

###Deploy Manually

Configure Cloud Foundry

If you haven't already, install the Cloud Foundry command line interface and connect to Bluemix.

Create Backing Services

Create a Cloudant service within Bluemix if one has not already been created:

$ cf create-service cloudantNoSQLDB Shared metrics-collector-cloudant-service

Deploy

To deploy to Bluemix, simply:

$ cf push

Note: You may notice that Bluemix assigns a URL to your application containing a random word. This is defined in the manifest.yml file where the random-route key set to the value of true. This ensures that multiple people deploying this application to Bluemix do not run into naming collisions. To specify your own route, remove the random-route line from the manifest.yml file and add a host key with the unique value you would like to use for the host name.

Privacy Notice: This web application includes code to track deployments to IBM Bluemix and other Cloud Foundry platforms. Tracking helps us measure our samples' usefulness, so we can continuously improve the content we offer to you. The following information is sent to a Deployment Tracker service on each deployment:

• Application Name (application_name)
• Space ID (space_id)
• Application Version (application_version)
• Application URIs (application_uris)

This data is collected from the VCAP_APPLICATION environment variable in IBM Bluemix and other Cloud Foundry platforms. IBM uses this data to track metrics around deployments of sample applications to Bluemix.

To disable deployment tracking, remove the following line from server.js:

require("cf-deployment-tracker-client").track();

Once that line is removed, you may also uninstall the cf-deployment-tracker-client npm package.

Try the Tutorial

Once you deploy, follow the tutorial to understand exactly how this app works and to learn how to collect user behavior data for your own web app or page.

When you're done, move on to Part 2 of this tutorial, where you’ll learn how to display collected data graphically in a report.

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