Project:LHS Graphs and Visualizations

LHS Graphs and Visualizations
Members	Elliot
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Overview

I'd like to supplement the Cacti graphs that we have for LHS bandwidth and power with metrics that provide insight to the growth of our community and organisation over time.

Initially I'd like to chart the following:

• Number of members
• Mailing list activity
• Wiki activity
• Website visitors and/or page impressions

Later I'd like to investigate:

• Space occupancy

Phase 1

To chart the initial metrics various bits of data will need to be exposed in a Cacti friendly way. I need help in getting access to these data sources so that I can write the various data input methods.

Number of members

• This data is presumably stored in a database and can be queried with a simple SELECT COUNT(ID) FROM ACCOUNTS or some such.
• It would be nice to import historic data into rrdtool for this one - perhaps by looking at the date of members first payments? See the Schema

Mailing list activity

• There is no API for Google Groups. Instead we could set up a Google Groups member account for this purpose and then periodically check the inbox for activity?

Wiki statistics

• We can get this using the MediaWiki API:

 http://wiki.hackspace.org.uk/w/api.php?action=query&meta=siteinfo&siprop=statistics&format=xml

Returns:

 <?xml version="1.0"?>
 <api>
   <query>
     <statistics
       pages="759"
       articles="215"
       views="229656"
       edits="7368"
       images="186"
       users="166"
       activeusers="22"
       admins="61"
       jobs="13"
     />
   </query>
 </api>

Website visitors and/or page impressions

The main site and the Wiki use Google Analytics and this has an API. This documented method looks promising:

 https://www.google.com/analytics/feeds/data?metrics=ga%3Avisits%2Cga%3Apageviews&start-date=2010-11-29&end-date=2010-12-13&max-results=50

Phase 2

Space occupancy

• We could use a directional IR occupancy counter. I think that we already have something like this in the LHS stores.