#Duly Noted

Duly noted is a redis backed stats and metrics tracker. It works as follows:

DulyNoted.track("page_views", for: "homepage")

This would log one page view for the home page. Then to see how many page views the home page has gotten, you would simply call:

DulyNoted.count("page_views", for: "homepage")

To count how many page views there have been across all pages, you can call:

DulyNoted.count("page_views")

You can also store meta data with your metrics by passing your data in a hash to the meta key like so:

DulyNoted.track("page_views", for: "homepage", meta: {user_agent: "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_7_2) AppleWebKit/535.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/15.0.874.121 Safari/535.2", ip_address: "128.194.3.138"})

If the metric was generated in the past but is just now being logged, you can alter it's time stamp with the generated_at key:

DulyNoted.track("page_views", for: "homepage", generated_at: 10.minutes.ago)

To get the count for a particular time range, you can use the time_start and time_end keys in the count call like so:

DulyNoted.count("page_views", for: "homepage", time_start: 1.day.ago, time_end: Time.now)

You can also just specify a time_range like so:

DulyNoted.count("page_views", for: "homepage", time_range: 1.day.ago..Time.now)

This will return the page view count for the home page for the past day.

There are a few other things it can do, check out the docs for more info.

##Install

You probably already guessed it, but to install just

gem install duly_noted

or add

gem 'duly_noted'

to your gemfile and run bundle install

##Configuration New in 1.0.2

You can now configure the *ahem* setting with the configure method in an initializer, like so:

DulyNoted.configure do |config|
	config.editable_for = 3600 # default is one hour
end

The editable_for configuration option will set the expiration on the id keys so your Redis database's key count and size doesn't shoot up crazy high. The default is for them to expire after one hour.

##What's New

• The motivation behind this release was to restore precious precious redis space back to our user(s)
• This update adds a #configure method which takes a block with one variable and allows you to set configuration setting(s). Currently there's only one configuration option, and that's editable_for, which will let you set the expire time on the id keys. So if you're not going to edit the meta hashes after a day, you could set it to 1.day. Alternatively, if you're never going to edit the meta hashes, you could set it to 0, which will delete them immediately.

• The main motivation behind this release was to stop using the timestamp as the unique identifier for the tracked metrics. We can only capture the time so precicely with ruby, and redis can take in so many metrics a second, that it would be possible to get duplicate timestamps, even when we measure the time to the millisecond. Using unique ids will make sure that you are not limited by duly_noted, but by the much more capable Redis.
• Obliterated ref_ids, and everything they stood for. Not really everything they stood for. Now each metric gets its own unique id.
• #track now returns the id of the metric you just tracked
• id's are unique across all of duly_noted, so when you update them with #update you don't need to specify which metric_name
• The first time you run a duly_noted command after updating the gem, it will attempt to update your redis schema. I did this on my own duly_noted setup with about 110k worth of unique metrics tracked, a DB size of 19MB, and a key count of 6 to a DB size of 35MB and a key count of 110600 in 75.26 seconds. In the next version, I'm either going to move the id keys into a hash, so it doesn't pollute the global keyspace any more than it has to, or, I'm going to set a default expire time on each id reference key. I'm leaning towards the expiration idea, because I don't think people have a use for being able to update any metric entry at any time.

• for is no longer required on count and query. If you call one of them without for it will count all of whatever metric you specified
• Added the chart method, which allows you to pull out your data in a handy way that's perfect for giving it to a charting library
• Now pipelines all of the keys that are set in the track method
• Added errors so that you know when something's gone wrong!
• Added the Updater which will do redis schema upgrades automatically when duly_noted does another major upgrade
• A special count_x_by_y dynamic method. Say you've tracked page views, and in the meta hash, you've stored their browser name. Now you want a breakdown of page views by browser, well… DulyNoted.count_page_views_by_browser would do just that. Yay metaprogramming!
• Added the ability to expire ref_ids. So if you know that you'll only need to edit your metadata for, say, the next 10 minutes, you can set the editable_for options to 10.minutes in the track, or in the update method. By default, ref_ids never expire.
• Some other little behind the scenes methods to help for the big surprise in 1.5.0

• Added the time_range option to count, and query

• Added the meta_fields option to query, which takes an array of fields to pull out from the meta hash

• Added the ref_id option to query, which takes a reference id and will return an array with one meta hash. I was going back and forth on whether or not it should wrap the hash in an array. It doesn't need to be, but I thought, just to make it consistent with it's usual output, I should make it return an array.

• Enough bug fixes to make it production ready! Yay!

##What's Gonna Be New

###1.5.0

• A sinatra app to view and peruse your metrics (think, resque)
• Resolution decay: currently, duly_noted stores all metrics at the highest resolution, timestamped down to a fraction of a second. With resolution decay, you can specify fall offs so that after, say, a month, they'll be grouped by day. So after a month has passed, you couldn't go back to a day and see it by hour, only total for that day. This will tremendously cut back on space, and is, of course, totally customizable.

##Contributing If you want to help, you should do it. Fork it, fix it, and send me a pull request. I will be delighted.