Nightfury

Concept

Nightfury provides a reporting framework built on Redis for Ruby/Ruby on Rails applications. The framework is designed to store different metrics in a time series or as a single value which can be easily queried. The following are the key terms:

Identity

A identity is an entity for which you want to store reports.

• In a ticketing system this might be Company or a Ticket or an Agent
• It has an id (can auto-generate but generally provided so you can map it to your db ids etc). So each Company can have its own CompanyIdentity
• It has many metrics.

Metrics

An identity has many metrics.

• Metric can be a single value or a time series.
• The value can be aggregate (average)

Tags

Identities can be tagged and have multiple tags. You can ask for stats for identities with certain tags over a particular time range (if the metric is a series)

Usage

Lets have a CompanyIdentity to track metrics of a company

  class CompanyIdentity < Nightfury::Identity::Base
    metric :number_of_users
    metric :tickets_count, :count_time_series, step: :day
    metric :first_response_time, :avg_time_series, step: :day
  end

Single Valued Metric

You can store single valued metric, generally used to store counts. In the above example number_of_users is a single valued metric. You can do the following operations on the metric.

  c = CompanyIdentity.new(1) # where 1 is the id
  c.number_of_users.set(0)
  # increment by 1
  c.number_of_users.incr
  # increment by 10
  c.number_of_users.incr(10)
  # decrement by 1
  c.number_of_users.decr
  # decrement by 5
  c.number_of_users.decr(5)
  puts "Ticket Count; should be 5 \n #{c.ticket_count.get}"

Time Series Metric

You can track a metric over time. NightFury stores the values in an time series. You can define the period between the day points using the step parameter.

Count Time Series Metric

In the above example tickets_count is a count_time_series with a step day. You can do the following operations on the metric.

  time_now = Time.now
  yesterday = time_now - 1.day
  tomorrow = time_now + 1.day
  # Increment yesterday's ticket count by 1
  c.tickets_count.incr(1, yesterday) 
  # Increment yesterday's ticket count by 2
  c.tickets_count.incr(1, yesterday) 
  # Decrement yesterday's ticket count by 1
  c.tickets_count.decr(1, yesterday)
  # Increment today's ticket count by 1
  # By default the incr_by argument is 1 and timestamp argument is Time.now
  # NightFury figures out the right datapoint to act on depending the timestamp and step of the metric
  c.tickets_count.incr
  # Get all datapoints between yesterday and tomorrow
  c.tickets_count.get_range(yesterday, tomorrow)
  # Get all datapoints
  c.tickets_count.get_all

Avg Time Series Metric

NightFury also supports avg_time_series. When you set a value of a avg_time_series metric, NightFury atomatically calculates the average for that step and stores it.

  # set the first_response_time of today
  c.first_response_time.set(1)
  c.first_response_time.set(2)
  # get the latest data point
  c.get #=> {'1380176549' => '1.5'}

See example.rb for more usage

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'nightfury'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install nightfury

Running in the wild

We built NightFury to power the reporting of SupportBee
It is also used to provide analytics in WhatsNew

Contributing

1. Fork it
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Added some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create new Pull Request