Now that StatsMix is live as a Heroku add-on, I’d like to provide more details on just how easy it is to add StatsMix to a Heroku application. The following tutorial illustrates how to get started tracking metrics in your application.

In this example, I’ll create a basic Rails app from scratch and then add in metrics tracking with StatsMix.

Assuming you are already have a Heroku account (if you don’t, you can get a free one here), create a new Rails application on Heroku following these steps: http://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/rails3

Next add the StatsMix Heroku add-on (detailed documentation):

heroku addons:add statsmix

We’ll automatically populate your API key as a Heroku config variable, which will be used by the StatsMix gem.

Let’s start by assuming we’re creating a basic blogging application. The first resource we’d create is posts:

rails generate scaffold post title:string description:text author:string
rake db:migrate

Now let’s fire up the application to make sure it works:

rails server

Navigate to /posts in your browser: http://localhost:3000/posts and you should see the basic CRUD scaffolding for posts.

We can now start to implement StatsMix in this basic app. Suppose we want to track every time a new post is created in our application. Just edit the posts_controller.rb with a single line of code:

StatsMix.track('Posts Created', 1)

def create
  @post = Post.new(params[:post])
 
  respond_to do |format|
    if @post.save
 
      StatsMix.track('Posts Created', value = 1, options = {})
 
      format.html { redirect_to(@post, :notice => 'Post was successfully created.') }
      format.xml  { render :xml => @post, :status => :created, :location => @post }
    else
      format.html { render :action => "new" }
      format.xml  { render :xml => @post.errors, :status => :unprocessable_entity }
    end
  end
end

Now let’s test it out by creating a new post: http://localhost:3000/posts/new

When you create the post, the controller is sending a call to the StatsMix API using the track method included in the Ruby gem. You can check the results by signing in to your Heroku account and clicking on the name of your Heroku app.

Click the add-ons menu in upper right hand corner, then select StatsMix. You’ll be automatically signed in to your new StatsMix launchpad where your first metric is listed. In this case, the metric listed is “Posts Created”.

Click on the name of the metric (again, in this example it’s “Posts Created”) and you’ll see a data point that one post was created.

You can manage all aspects of this metric right from this view. Edit the the metric name, change the chart settings, share the chart, or manually enter or edit the raw data from here.

If you click on chart settings, you can control the date range, chart type, and the data grouping. The first two are self explanatory, but let’s discuss data grouping briefly.

The default setting is “none” — this means all the data you send will be displayed in real time. By selecting daily, weekly, monthly, or annual, StatsMix will roll up the data and display it in those time frames. So if you want to see daily groupings of your data, just select “daily”. It’s that simple.

If you don’t want to track events in development, add this to development.rb (be sure to restart your server!):

StatsMix.ignore = true

or

StatsMix.test_metric_name = "My Test Metric"

You can also download the full StatsMix/Heroku demo application from Github here: https://github.com/tmarkiewicz/statsmix-heroku-demo