Simple tracking system to capture requests and stores visitors asynchronously in the plain text log for further analysis.
The solution consists of two services (projects): one collects the data, other handles writing to the file.
This API has only one endpoint GET /track that returns a transparent 1-pixel image in GIF format and collects the following information:
ReferrerheaderUser-Agentheader- Visitor IP address
After the information has been collected, it sends an event to a SNS topic.
Consume events from a SQS Queue and stores it in the append-only file. The path to the file is defined via appsettings.json.
The format of the file is date-time of the visit in ISO 8601 format in UTC | referrer | user-agent | ip.
The IP address is the only mandatory value. The rest can be substituted with null when empty.
Example
2023-12-10T22:22:43.7936205+00:00|https://localhost:7058/swagger/index.html|null|192.168.1.1
2023-12-11T10:06:40.5064909+00:00|https://localhost:7058/swagger/index.html|Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/120.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 Edg/120.0.0.0|10.0.0.1
To address the presented challenge, several approaches could be considered, such as utilizing gRPC. However, to sidestep the complexity associated with implementing protocol buffers and similar mechanisms, I have chosen a more straightforward solution in this case. I opted for a simplified Pub/Sub approach employing LocalStack, along with the integration of SNS and SQS.