

Hummingbird, Real Time Web Traffic Visualization - boh
http://projects.nuttnet.net/hummingbird/

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mnutt
I'm the author of Hummingbird. I originally built it for the flash sample sale
site Gilt Groupe, to visualize the gigantic traffic spike that happens at
noon. (from 20 req/s to about 2000 req/s then, probably at least double that
now)

Since then I've been slowly building out some features that are more useful
for smaller sites, like the map view. The awesome mapping library is PolyMaps,
using CloudMade tiles.

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mnutt
And sorry to those of you outside the US--I've recentered the map so that you
can now see more of the world by default.

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chanri
Thanks for creating this and open-sourcing this great app!

One question: Does aggregates.html work? I can see that metrics are being
recorded in mongodb, but it does not load the js properly to display the
hourly, daily, and weekly metrics. I can get everything else to work fine (in
index.html). Thanks!

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dangrossman
I'm glad someone put that demo back up. I saw it in presentation slides last
year but the live site never worked when I tried it. node.js had already
changed a lot since it was written so I thought perhaps it had become dead
code.

I built something similar recently, also using node.js to power the data
collection:

<http://www.w3counter.com/stats/demo/1>

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davidu
Nice work -- Looks slick. How do you differentiate from ChartBeat?

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dangrossman
W3Counter is a 7 year old web stats service where that dashboard is just one
feature, whereas that's their whole product.

I really built it because it'd be fun anyway, not to compete. It doesn't do
half the neat things Chartbeat does.

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kordless
I hacked up something similar the other day with Smoothie Charts:
<http://kedge.loggly.com/>. I was inspired by Hummingbird though - glad to see
it working again!

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AdamGibbins
This looks awesome, but is unusable on my Quadro FX 380 in Linux - X spikes to
100% and my entire machine (despite being a Xeon + 16G + SSD) lags incredibly.

Checked with a colleague and it works fine for them however, must be a bug in
my setup of some description.

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Urgo
Hummingbird looks like it has potential. I currently use a product called
Woopra: <http://www.woopra.com/> to do the same thing. It's a solid product
but gets expensive when my sites get a lot of traffic (they only give you 30k
pageviews a month for free). Once hummingbird matures if it gains more of the
functionality woopra offers this could be a viable DIY alternative.

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rjrodger
You should check out my take on this: <http://chartaca.com> Free, as many
charts as you like, and no data limits! :)

Just a word of warning ... it's barely even an MVP at this stage. More a sort
of experiment to see how far I can push one of those free Amazon micro
instances (pretty far when you use node.js as it happens!).

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cmer
It would be great if Hummingbird offered a way to track API requests we get.
Obviously, a transparent gif won't work for that...

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dangrossman
Why not? Your API can make HTTP requests to the URL of the transparent gif.
And if that doesn't do what you want it to do, it's open source so you can
make it do so. Or write to the same database with your API and just use the
code for visualization.

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Corrado
I really like the real time displays but we also need to look at what happened
yesterday, last month, etc. Is there any way to get historical
information/graphs/charts?

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digitaltothem
Well, there are many web analytics tools that will show zou historical data,
you can use Google Analytics for free, then you also have Google Webmasters
Tools which you a different insight into your website. But monitoring the
traffic in real time is a real curiosity. That is where Hummingbird comes in.
Very neat.

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Corrado
Agreed. However, if Hummingbird is capturing the data anyway it should be
possible to build an interface to allow me to troll through it. I just didn't
know if this was built-in to HB or if would be something that I would have to
build.

