Mwp-tracking-plugin NPM

Tracking

Overview

Logging

The tracking logs are Avro-encoded and serialized to JSON according to the Analytics Logging spec.

In Google App Engine, we use Google Pub/Sub to publish tracking data to a pre-defined 'topic'.

The Pub/Sub configuration will only activate when the GAE_INSTANCE environment variable is set. In addition, the environment must be configured to automatically authenticate with Google Cloud.

In production, Pub/Sub authentication is handled automatically by the runtime environment.

Logging development activity

In development, you will need to use the gcloud SDK to configure your environment to send activity logs to Google Pub/Sub with the following command:

$ gcloud auth application-default login

Once set up, you can run the application in 'GAE' mode with

$ GAE_INSTANCE=foo yarn start

or an equivalent startup command. Tracking data from this dev instance should then be consumed by an analytics back end, although you will need to work with the data team to find the records it produces - they are not shown in the Google App Engine web console.

Note that we do not currently have a unique place to store tracking data from dev, so any tracking data that you produce will be merged into production tracking data. For small amounts of data, this shouldn't significantly affect analytics.

Activity tracking

Activity tracking is provided by a request.trackActivity method, which has two responsibilities:

Manage tracking IDs that are passed into the request through cookies
Log the formatted, encoded tracking ID state of the request to stdout

Click tracking

Click tracking consists of 3 related modules:

clickWriter for writing the click Event data to a Redux action.
clickState for defining Redux click actions and reducing those actions into Redux state, and writing click tracking data into a cookie.
clickReader for reading the click tracking data cookie on the server.

Ultimately, the only 'fixed' requirements are that the click tracking data must be passed to the server in a cookie, and the serialization of that data must be handled by the click tracking plugin/module - it is designed to work seamlessly with parallel behavior implemented in Meetup Classic.

Behavior

The platform currently adds click and change listeners when creating the Redux store for the browser - this is done on application setup and is guaranteed not to run on the server. Each click and change event is sent to clickWriter, which dispatches a Redux CLICK_TRACK action.

The click reducer is built into the platform reducer, and will store click tracking data for the lifetime of the session, or until it is cleared with a particular click 'clear' Redux action.

When the user navigates to a new page, the generated API request will read the click tracking data from state, clear the click tracking state, and then set the click tracking cookie. The cookie value will be sent with the API request, read by the server, and then the server will force-clear the cookie.

Leakage

Because click data only gets sent to the server when a user navigates to another location within the application, there is a possibility of losing data when a user navigates to another site, or even back to Meetup Classic, because a 'location change' action will not be dispatched and the Redux store will be destroyed upon navigation.