Metricfire - Powerful (PHP) Application Metrics Made Easy!

Listed under: Awesome Stuff > Check It Out on Wed 1st February 2012

 

If you're a PHP application developer or software engineer, this should be saved to your "Things to Check Out Right Now" list.

Metricfire (http://www.metricfire.com) is a new service that allows PHP (and currently Python) developers to record practically any measurable statistic they want to get from their application, in real time. It's an analytics service with a difference - you only send what you wish to be measured, and Metricfire presents you with highly configurable graphs of your specific data.

Certain other analytics services are all fine and well for recording website visits, who came from where, how long they stayed, blah blah, but are severely lacking when you have a requirement to record a set of metrics that are individual to your site or application. This is where Metricfire takes over and shines.

Once you've set up an account, you get an API key, and access to a bare PHP file. Simply include the PHP file in a small script as outlined in your account, and two lines of code in a PHP file running on a live server will send data to Metricfire. Done.

Viewing your data is easy too. To begin with you are presented with an entirely blank dashboard. Click an area to add a graph, select your application (usually named {filename}php where {filename} is the name of your PHP file), select your metric, and save it. You now have a real-time graph of your data as it passes to Metricfire - no need to wait 24 hours for the data to be collated - updates are done roughly every 5 seconds. Awesome.
   ..click to add a graph..

 

   ..and configure your graph how you'd like to view the data.

 

Metricfire currently uses UDP to transfer data in real-time between your application and its servers. The use of UDP here allows Metricfire to eschew TCP's handshaking process, and as a result it doesn't slow down your application whatsoever. The use of UDP also allows Metricfire itself to provide such up-to-the-5-second data graphing, on your dashboard.

(For those of you who believe that UDP is unreliable for critical data transfer - fear not, as I'm told that a client-based data aggregator is in the works for full reliability)

Metricfire will be using a SAAS (software-as-a-service) model, with the very basic offer being free (yay!) with one dashboard, and pricing moving up from there as your application metrics requirements grow. It's still in Beta though, so you'll need to keep an eye on their site for the pricing model when it does come about. The guys are really responsive to how/when/where people are using the service too, so if you do use it for something quirky, let them know!

Have a play with Metricfire; you'll soon see that you can send heaps of data to it - thousands of metrics per second - and see the same data graphed in almost real time.

Stay tuned for a custom CodeIgniter library for Metricfire, customised from the original Metricfire PHP file by yours truly.
 

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