jameslittle.me

Building Internal Analytics for Stork

June 2, 2021

This post is outdated. I've rewritten this in Rust and am now hosting it on Render as part of an effort to be less of a server shepherd.

I wrote a little Node application that downloads all the Cloudfront logs that Stork generates, and sticks the data in a SQLite database. I stuck a Dockerfile in front of that application. Then, I added another directory that has a Dockerfile pointing to Datasette. Now my project is a monorepo that contains multiple services.

A monorepo? Services? Complexity has skyrocketed.

I started up an EC2 box. I installed Docker on it, and I set up docker-compose and a crontab so that this box does two things: it serves my Datasette instance on port 80, and it runs the Node application on a cron job. Now, every 6 hours, my Datasette instance updates with the latest usage stats for Stork, and I can use the Datasette web instance from anywhere.

I can write SQL queries and get stats about the HTTP requests coming into the Stork CDN. It’s my own little data warehouse! Mission accomplished.


I think Observable released Plot about one day after I got Datasette working. Suddenly, I wanted—nay, needed—to do some fancy visualization with my Stork data so I can really see the stats.

I tweaked my Datasette Dockerfile to install a token-based authentication plugin. Now my data is secure, but accessible via an API. I wrote an Observable notebook that fetches the most recent usage data and plots it. Now I have a usage dashboard with a graph showing how many hits stork.js got per day this year.

It’s got a rolling average!

I don't think I'm ready to share the y-axis here, sorry.

I reckon this is the most stable thing I’ve launched in a prod environment. This feels like the deployment with the smallest bundle of hacks I’ve ever created. I spent shockingly little time installing software on the EC2 box, which is a task I’ve easily burned weeks on before. Moreover, I can run each service independently in production or on my personal computer. I’m happy with this because I don’t think I’ll have to keep worrying about it forever.

Acknowledgements: Terin helped reaffirm that I was using Docker correctly. Thanks, Terin!