Public analytics & metrics pipeline

[jupyterhub]

Public analytics & metrics pipeline

[choldgraf]

then we can make it into a song like

who's the best at building docker? binderbinderhubhub
who supports both R and Rocker? binderbinderhubhub
who connects all the pieces? binderbinderhubhub
who can reproduce your thesis? binderbinderhubhub

ok no more coffee for me this morning

[yuvipanda]

The way you'd usually do this is:

1. Move binderhub to emitting structured logs (jupyterhub/binderhub#219)
2. Tail these logs from a different service (just do the equivalent of kubectl logs, or pull in from the stackdriver API)
3. This service is accessible over the web (as events.mybinder.org, sure!), and probably produces an EventStream (so can be easily consumed from front end JS as well as other languages)

This accomplishes a few things:

1. Makes this completely optional, and doesn't bloat the binderhub code
2. (2) and (3) are quite generic and unrelated to binderhub itself, so we might actually be able to find some tool that already does it. Even if we don't, this is conceptually quite simple to write, and scales well horizontally

[choldgraf]

Totally agree, this could be a great community feature, and is a key step towards making a "case" for binder tech as being impactful.

One challenge: how would this work once Binder is federated? Would these statistics be kept at the BinderHub level? If there are multiple public streams out there, then it would be straightforward to aggregate them, so maybe not such a big deal so long as the data is there.

[yuvipanda]

Indeed, ideally every BinderHub would make its stream public and people can aggregate. See https://wikiapiary.com/wiki/Main_Page for how this sortof aggregation happens for MediaWiki instances (which run Wikimedia but also other websites on the internet unrelated to wikimedia)

[ctb]

+1 on the federation question :). Does this mean we'll need to have a BinderHubHub?

[choldgraf]

I prefer "binderbinderhubhub"

[betatim]

What kind of tools/setups would we use to collect the events emitted by binderhub?

As a user of this data, I'd hit "events.mybinder.org" and receive all future events (similar to how you subscribe to the twitter 1% stream?).

[yuvipanda]

We could also explicitly have a 'public' field in the JSON log output, thus whitelisting the things that appear in the public stream. This protects against things like secrets accidentally leaking.

[yuvipanda]

boom, https://archive.analytics.mybinder.org/