Google Analytics for the Real World: A Conversation with Sharon Biggar of Path Intelligence

by Joshua-Michéle Ross | @jmichele | comments: 5

In preparation for the upcoming Web 2.0 Summit I am posting a few conversations with attendees that embody the Web Squared Theme.

Path Intelligence uses sensor technology to understand shopping behavior in retail spaces by detecting and tracking the RF signals from mobile phones.

As Sharon Biggar, co-founder, succinctly puts it - “we are like Google Analytics for the real world” giving offline retailers the same visibility on shopping behavior that online retail has enjoyed for years.

While human observation has been put in the service of retail analysis for a long time, using machine based sensing and computation is different in a few fundamental ways. First, the quantity and efficiency with which data is gathered simply wouldn’t be possible using human observers. Second, the data is based on unbiased observation of people in their habitat and avoids a lot of the errors built into any research that relies on self-disclosure (I wandered around Victoria’s Secret for half an hour - I think not.)

Using sensors to understand and optimize retail flow is a logical first commercial step. This type of technology gets more interesting when it gets applied to other problems. As Sharon describes in the podcast there are opportunities to deploy the same techniques of mobile sensing in areas as wide ranging as counter-terrorism (locating phones that have been stationary for a long period of time is a potential indicator of phones being used as detonators for roadside bombs) and emergency services (using these sensors to gauge attendance and large events and scale services accordingly).

Sharon will be participating at the Summit in the panel, Humans as Sensors.

Disclosure: O’Reilly Alphatech ventures is an investor in Path Intelligence.

Understanding Web Operations Culture - the Graph & Data Obsession

by Jesse Robbins | @jesserobbins | comments: 8

We’re quite addicted to data pr0n here at Flickr. We’ve got graphs for pretty much everything, and add graphs all of the time.

-John Allspaw, Operations Engineering Manager at Flickr & author of The Art of Capacity Planning

One of the most interesting parts of running a large website is watching the effects of unrelated events affecting user traffic in aggregate. Web traffic is something that companies typically keep very secret, and often the only time engineers can talk about it is late at night, at a bar, and very much off the record.

There are many good reasons for keeping this kind of information confidential, particularly for publicly traded companies with complicated disclosure requirements. There are also downsides, the biggest being that is difficult for peers to learn from each other and compare notes.

John Allspaw recently created a WebOps Visualizations group on Flickr for sharing these kinds of graphs with the confidential information removed. Here’s an example of a traffic drop seen both by Flickr & by Last.FM that coincided with President Obama’s inauguration.

Similar traffic drop on Last.FM seen on the right

Google saw a similar drop as well

Was it because everybody went to Twitter?

Besides being an interesting story, sharing these kinds of graphs help people build better monitoring tools and processes. As just one example: How should the WebOps team respond to this dip in traffic? Is it an outage? The inaguration was a very well known event and so it’s easy to explain the drop in traffic… what happens when a similar drop in traffic occurs? Should the WebOps team be looking at CNN (or trends in twitter) along with everything else?

How do you tell when that unexpected 10% drop in traffic is really just people with something more important to do than browse your site?

(Note: Updated since original posting to add Google & Twitter graphs and annotations, and to switch the Last.FM graphic with an annotated one after I got permission.)

Hyperic CloudStatus service dashboard launches at Velocity!

by Jesse Robbins | @jesserobbins | comments: 6

Javier Soltero just launched CloudStatus during his Hyperic sponsor session today at Velocity. CloudStatus is a public health dashboard for web services like Amazon's EC2/S3, and Google's App Engine.

Javier called to tell me about this last week after I declared that "Service Monitoring Dashboards are mandatory". This comes right after Amazon and Google had visible outages, and couldn't have happened at a better time. I'm really excited to see this idea take off, as it's something that is critical to the broad adoption of web services and cloud computing.

Service Monitoring Dashboards are mandatory for production services!

by Jesse Robbins | @jesserobbins | comments: 6

Google App Engine went down earlier today. GAE is still a developer preview release, and currently lacks a public monitoring dashboard. Unfortunately this means that many people either found out from their app and/or admin consoles being unavailable or from Mike Arrington's post on TechCrunch.

Google has a strong Web Operations culture, and there are numerous internal monitoring tools in use across the company, along with a smaller set available to customers. It's suprising that Google launched a developer platform without providing something beyond an email group, although they are by no means the first to do so.

Service Monitoring Dashboards are mandatory for production services and platforms!

• If you launch a platform that people pay you money for, you need to have a real time service dashboard. Ideally this should be decoupled from the rest of your infrastructure.
• Don't rely on platforms that lack service monitoring dashboards for production.

Many companies are initially reluctant to provide this kind of monitoring to the public, and only do so in reaction to an outage. However, it seems that every company that offers such a dashboard uses it as a source of competitive advantage.

The best example of this is trust.salesforce.com which they launched after series of outages in 2006. Amazon (eventually) launched a status dashboard for AWS, and added RSS feeds for specific services which I think is pretty cool.

Javier Soltero at Hyperic points out

1. The reports of service outages arrive long after anyone who depends on the services can possibly do anything to mitigate their effect.
2. The services themselves seem incapable of providing any visibility into the circumstances that might lead to future outages.

[...]Even TechCrunch points out that the Google Apps blog doesn’t even mention the outage. Other clouds rely on blogs such as this one, this one, or maybe even this one (from our good friends at Mosso). These are all places where outages can be discussed, but not the right means for people to find out whether it their application that crashed, or the cloud that it depends on.

(Updated:Niall Kennedy pointed out that GAE is still a preview release, and I agree that my original wording was wrong. My intent is to emphasize the importance of providing a public service dashboard and so I've edited accordingly.)