Submitted by Roland on Wed, 2011-04-06 09:48
The cult of real-time metrics (in addition to big data) in Silicon Valley-style (Silicon Valley is now a state of mind and no longer just a place) startups now. Graph crucial and key metrics all the time and all in real-time ! I jest but it is valuable! Heretofore real-time metrics graphing has just been too hard unless you have the talent and experience of firms like Etsy to put the necessary infrastructure (graphing software, metrics collecting software, etc) in place.
However that difficulty is an opportunity that will be rapidly addressed (because real-time graphing is an itch that can be rapidly scratched by developers and it's helpful to companies' bottom line) and you can start to see this being addressed in projects like Simulchart.
In 1 hour I was able to get SimulChart graphing every 10 minutes the number of new Get Satisfaction Thunderbird topics using some node.js code (this is not a business critical real-time metric; i have plans for other real-time Thunderbird metrics, stay tuned :-) !). That's the future! 1 hour to get a business critical metric graphed in real time without having to stand up home grown infrastructure like Etsy and flickr did.
If anybody knows of any other real time open source and/or free graphing toolkits or services, let me know!
Submitted by Roland on Mon, 2010-09-06 23:11
Jonathan aka "protz" built on top of my idea of a real-time support dashboard for Thunderbird powered by the GetSatisfaction API (tech: JavaScript, CSS, HTML, JQUERY, protvis) and made it awesome (merci beaucoup Jonathan!) with some fab styling from Andy.
It's so 1.0 :-) i.e. it's early days but it delivers on the promise of showing what's happening with the Get Satisfaction forum. Check it on gitbhub or if you running Firefox 3.6 or above click on the following link to run it from my dropbox (yay for dropbox deployment!):
Help Wanted
The code is on github. Fork away, send us a pull request, you know the drill :-)! Please make it better e.g. improve the Javascript and improve the CSS, add more cool visualizations, adapt it to your getsatisfaction community etc
Current Features as I write this blog post:
- Today's hot keywords (a bit mislabelled: should be today's hot email providers)
- Today's support pattern, a bar graph showing when folks have filed support topics and replies over the last calendar day
- 5 most active topics in the last 24 hours
- 5 latest created support topics
- 5 random topics from today
- 5 most recently solved topics
- 5 latest active solved topics (since we can't really close a topic, people can still comment on a solved topic so it's good to know this; this is a major Get Satisfaction gap IMHO, we need a a *real* close feature
- Real-time tag cloud - neat but not really helpful since most of the tags users use are not helpful
- applause feature when a support topic is marked close i.e. it plays an applause sound!!!!!
- Real-time - updated every two minutes!
Current bugs / feature requests
- make it work in Safari, Chrome and Opera (sorry IE :-) actually I am not sorry LOL!) - this is a small matter of javascript modification to make it work on the major browser JavaScript implementations
- improve the styling
- Add avatars of the folks who solved support topics
- The Get Satisfaction API could be improved with better documentation as well as support for real-time stats. Would be great for example to have an API call for the current calendar's day's solved topics, current contributors who solved topics etc instead of having to compute this (this is thinking out loud, haven't thought of this too much will blog about it more in the future)
- Deploy to github static pages instead of dropbox!
