simple-telemetry

A simple telemetry library that tracks user actions

Usage no npm install needed!

<script type="module">
  import simpleTelemetry from 'https://cdn.skypack.dev/simple-telemetry';
</script>

README

A Telemetry User Action library.

No instrumentation required

Add this to your top level index.js file

...

import { run } from "simple-telemetry";

...

const config = {
  user: "MyUser",
  appName: "Test App",
  idxAttribute: "data-testid",
  attributes: {
    "data-telemetry": {
      name: "data-telemetry",
      format: (value) => {
        return value.name;
      },
      processValue: (value) => {
        return value;
      },
    },
    "data-testid": {
      name: "data-testid",
      format: (value) => {
        return value.name;
      },
      processValue: (value) => {
        return value;
      },
    },
  },
  ignoreEvents: {
    click: "noTarget",
  },
  keepAliveDuration: 5000,
  api: {
    url: "http://localhost:3005",
    analytics: "/analytics",
    alive: "/alive",
    route: "/route",
  },
};

...

Note: There are still bugs and some things don't just work quite right yet...

  • every click is logged even clicks on background (This should change...)
  • uses sendBeacon from Beacon API
  • plain javascript

Config attributes

Attribute Description Value
events target DOM events array
target.attributes attributes to be used for logging if they exist array
keepAliveDuration how long before a user is considered to be idle millisecs
api.url url for sendBeacon http calls uri
api.analytics path for sendBeacon analytics http calls string
api.route path for sendBeacon route http calls string
api.alive path for sendBeacon alivehttp calls string

Events

Events to listen to can be specified (This is in flux as this may not be necessary)

Target Attributes

These are attributes that will be extracted and passed back through the API to the backend (if there is one)

backend API

  • url => the backend url i.e. http://my.backend.com this has to be a http backend as we are using BEACON API for sending events.

  • analytics => path of the analytics endpoint route

    • mouse event
    • keyboard event
  • route => path of the route endpoint route

    • route change event
  • alive => path of the keepalive endpoint route

    • idle event
    • busy event

Backend Server

Not my problem :-)

... that being said a simple express server should do

const express = require("express");
const bodyParser = require("body-parser");
const app = express();

// the server port
const port = 3005;

// body parser -> probably deprecated
app.use(bodyParser.text());

app.post("/analytics", (req, res) => {
  console.log("analytics", JSON.parse(req.body));
  res.sendStatus(204);
});

app.post("/alive", (req, res) => {
  console.log("alive", JSON.parse(req.body));
  res.sendStatus(204);
});

app.post("/route", (req, res) => {
  console.log("route", JSON.parse(req.body));
  res.sendStatus(204);
});

app.listen(port, () => {
  console.log(`Example app listening at http://localhost:${port}`);
});