Usage Statistics for PASS #1115
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Objective
The objective of this project was to develop a method of recording usage statistics for the PASS web app while also keeping user data secure.
Matomo
Matomo was the data tracking platform of choice. Matomo is a service that allows for the tracking of usage statistics on the web app itself. This includes page views, buttons clicked, etc. Matomo was chosen because it is not linked to Google's analytics platform and the service can be hosted on one of our own servers. In this project, matomo was implemented to begin to collect usage statistics.
By default, matomo collects statistics on page views. However, a roadblock prevented further development on more specific usage statistics. This was because of an issue with matomo using http and the web browser requiring the use of https. Therefore, matomo was configured to use the reverse proxy already present in PASS. Once matomo was configured with the reverse proxy, another issue prevented further development. This issue was not very clear to the mentors and I and required further research that we did not have time for. Nonetheless, matomo is essentially fully implemented and, once the issue is fixed, it should be able to start collecting data on page views by default.
Metrics Page
Matomo is a good service for tracking metrics in terms of actual app usage.
However, more specific metrics regarding data within PASS can not be gathered
using Matomo. Therefore, a Metrics page was created within the pass web app
itself. The page can be found on the main navigation bar when a user logs into PASS.
It can also be found in the footer of any page in the PASS web app.
Virtually any metric that involves the actual data stored in PASS can be
displayed here. There is one metric that is already implemented which is a
list of the Journals and how many Submissions have been made per Journal.
The metric is calculated in
routes/metrics.js. I was unable to actuallycalculate the metric because the actual PASS data is inaccessible from my
local copy of pass-ember. The test data does not have enough data in order
to determine whether the calculation of the metric is working correctly or
not.
A more detailed documentation on what exactly was implemented and where it was implemented is in
CHANGES.md