{"id":7026,"date":"2024-06-19T16:47:17","date_gmt":"2024-06-19T14:47:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.besharp.it\/?p=7026"},"modified":"2024-06-19T16:47:20","modified_gmt":"2024-06-19T14:47:20","slug":"turning-unexpected-services-into-a-data-source-an-unconventional-example","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.besharp.it\/turning-unexpected-services-into-a-data-source-an-unconventional-example\/","title":{"rendered":"Turning unexpected services into a data source: an unconventional example"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
When we interact with something, we generate data. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
In 2016, a single internet user was projected to create 1.7 MB of data per second every day by 2020. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Those figures were probably underestimated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Data is everywhere and sometimes hidden in unexpected places, like little treasures. As we’ll see, this can happen for services used for what can be considered a humble purpose, but they turn out to contain valuable information.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This fact reminds me of the history of the lobster<\/a>: historically, lobsters were not desired and considered food for poor people. Early Americans even used lobster as yard fertilizer and fishing bait. Prisoners and indentured servants complained because they were forced to eat lobster very often. By the 1920s, the demand for lobster started to increase until they became the precious food we know.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Let’s see how we can find data in “today’s lobster”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n CloudWatch RUM is a relatively new addition to Amazon CloudWatch services. <\/p>\n\n\n\n It monitors real users’ activity to track website performance metrics (web vitals) and identify issues within user sessions. Its real power is its X-ray integration for serverless applications, so you can track an error that occurred in a lambda and see what the user was doing. My colleagues Alessio and Daniele already told us about X-Ray<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When you deploy the CloudWatch RUM snippet on your website, it sends metrics and events to the service endpoints. Data will be available for visualization in the dashboard. <\/p>\n\n\n\n This is an example:<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n You can also see sessions, user journeys, and detailed error statistics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n Besides being a useful tool, it can help us turn our business into data-driven. <\/p>\n\n\n\n While this service is always used as a monitoring and reporting tool, it can also be used to extract data to reveal hidden insights: in fact, its real value relies upon the events and metrics captured by the service. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Let’s unveil them and see their real potential.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As we said, the first kind of data (readily available and accessible) is metrics, such as page views, session counts, and so on. You can find a list here<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\nCloudWatch RUM<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n
<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n