BIG Analytics is a widget for studio that tracks anything you throw at it, on live servers. It’s fully customizable and runs using Datastores.
Why?
Because I wanted to
Why not use developer stats / web-based approach?
a.) Developer stats sucks because:
No API support to track custom stats
Can only (at the time of writing this) track revenue, age group, visits, visit time, and crash rates.
Data before 5pm PST is inaccurate
Graphs will visually glitch out constantly
Can’t be accessed via. studio
Data is not live and takes at least ~30 minutes to update
b.) Web-based approaches suck because:
Free services suffer from either limited bandwidth or long delays (~4 hours)
Opens up possible security holes in your games
Your key is at risk of being leaked
Upkeeping your own server costs a pretty penny (if you’re not going the free route)
Can’t be accessed via. studio
Can this be used in a game with heavy datastore usage? How costly?
Yes. BIG Analytics was built to be as efficient as possible. It abuses OrderedDatastores to prevent constant throttling and constantly monitors itself to stay away from the budget. You could theoretically track 60 individual stats a minute without hitting above the current limit, and exponentially more depending on the settings.
How would you add stats to track?
Add a module:
Module variables will be tracked for changes independently. The studio plugin will automatically get updated.
I was getting ready for a link to the plugin after reading the first parts. Sounded like he was intending on having it be open source. And then I got to the “Where can I get my dirty hands on it?” and the following note under it. And I was like “Oh… ok”
I wouldn’t recommend using a free service for production… but Heroku free tier still has enough hours for the entire month every single month (if you have a valid cc on file for verification).
Neat! this is actually quite nice for a datastore approach. Though personally, I’d rather an external database, because you can correlate data with different tables and timestamps quite fast, and learn skills from running databases.
