Day: 20 August 2008

Reporting Stats

A few years ago when I was the integration architect in charge of my Global 500 customers EAI projects, the product that we used did not really offer any way to track the number of messages travelling through the system. To get around this, we added a little library that recorded a small amount of information about each message. The idea was that every application (message flow) within the EAI system would be instrumented with this code and we would gain an oversight over which interfaces were the important ones and which ones made a return on their investment. The sort of data we collected was: Interface / Application / Process Name Message Type Message Size Timestamp Status (eg. IN, OUT, SUCCESS, FAIL) Correlation Token (in case several messages belonged together) Error (ie. details of an error) Custom Data (specific to each interface / app / process) There was probably more... it was a few years ago now :-) Anyway, we soon discovered that there were applications that were not even being used, even though our customers had paid many tens of thousands of dollars for them (ok, I admit that isn't a lot of money in the IT world). Since then Google has created its "Analytics" offering which generates some excellent reports for web site statistics. Indeed, maxant has always collected web stats for the websites it runs. It is very important to know your users / customers usage patterns, in order to be able to understand their real…

Read more