

Hi My Name is John…and I am addicted to analytics - jnunemaker
http://railstips.org/blog/archives/2011/03/21/hi-my-name-is-john/

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mwexler
Not to pike too much, since measuring is a big step from not measuring... but
IMHO, this isn't analytics. Graphing and looking at things going up and down
is just tracking and reporting. Looking at causes, looking for correlations
(when you can't find a cause, see if the correlations give a clue), grouping
up data to understand what is "normal" so that real deviations stand out from
noise, pattern detection, linking of variables into directional chains (where
possible), all that is analytics. (And yes, he does do some manual analysis
when one of his metrics is awry... but that doesn't make it analytics, just
another step in the right direction.)

I'm as guilty as the next guy to call metrics "analytics", partially because
it takes some analysis to pick "the right" metric. But it's gone too far: I
fear that we've corrupted analytics (which is really just a corruption of
analysis, or maybe a portmanteau?) into being applied to pretty much any
dashboard, visualization, or counting system.

We finally have cheap storage, fast counters, great parallel systems... so
let's do measure everything, and revel in the data. But let's also admit that
simply measuring is not (yet) analytics, just a necessary first step... and
that it's just reporting until that additional level of, dare I say it,
analysis, is applied to it.

I say this partially to push us all to take that next step, to not accept just
counters, even if they are pretty and realtime, but to push for more analytics
embedded in our tools, be they easy UI to show interactions between variables
through to stats/AI/ML which finds patterns, shows outliers, and reveals
opportunities or pitfalls.

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jnunemaker
The article starts with reporting/graphing but then goes on to how I analyzed
those reports/graphs to actually fix an issue.

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newobj
Excuse the shameless plug, but if you're interested in metrics and analytics,
maybe you'd be interested in joining the AWS CloudWatch team?
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2284954>

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yakto
I'm gonna go out on a limb and tell you that John's probably happy at his own
company, <http://orderedlist.com/>

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d0m
<http://xkcd.com/833/> ;-)

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mikiem
"Hi John"

