Collect website user activity data and index it into Splunk

This demo shows interaction of a client side agent running in a browser and Splunk server. There is a single page website in agent/index.html that implements a minimalistic tictactoy game. This page loads a javascript agent that traps usera activity events and posts them to Splunk using HTTP Event Collector. Javascript agent is included with a single line at the begining of index.html:

<script src="./dejavu.js"></script>

For the sake of simplicity only mousedown and mouseup events are handled in our browser client. Adding more event handlers is very simple. For instance one may trap mousemove events using the code below:

    document.addEventListener('mousemove', function(event) {
        postEventToSplunk({
            type: event.type,
            info: {
                x: event.x,
                y: event.y,
                button: event.buttons != undefined ? event.buttons : event.which
            }
        });
    });

Splunk HTTP event collector supports "batching" (i.e., merge multiple pieces of input data into a single chunk). It's strongly recommended to use batching for mousemove because it produces huge number of individual events.

Due to restrictions of cross-site scripting limitations it's less convenient to send data to Splunk server directly. Instead javascript code posts events to a "proxy" located on the same server. agent/dejavu.php is our simple proxy that resends it's input to Splunk server.

In our tictactoy demo every gameboard cell has its own id that is composed of cell column and row. Browser agent traps user clicks and they immediately become available in Splunk in form of json entities. For example click in the middle of the gameboard is indexed as:

{
  "type": "mousedown",
  "info": {
    "x": 138,
    "y": 136,
    "target": {
      "id": "(1,1)",
      "class": "class: (1,1)"
    }
  }
}

License

The MIT License (MIT)

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.