Platform Team/Usage Statistics

Summary

Sugar usage statistics might be very useful from, e.g., an educational or research point of view. Statistics might be anonymous or personalized (by taking special efforts to keep information secure and local for use only by a particular deployment).

Statistics

All types of statistics are identified by IDs in a dot separated hierarchy. This makes it possible to refer to the particular type or level of data.

• shell
  Shell related stats.
  • shell.uptime
    How long Shell is running.
  • shell.ontop
    How long Shell window is on top.
  • shell.buddies
    Number of buddies in the Neighborhood view.
  • shell.friends
    Number of buddies in the Groups view.
• journal
  Journal related activity.
  • journal.ontop
    How long Journal window is on top.
  • journal.updates
    Number of update requests from the Journal window.
  • journal.deletes
    Number of delete requests from the Journal window.
• activity
  Activities related stats; specified only for the particular activity.
  • activity.uptime
    How long Activity is running.
  • activity.ontop
    How long Activity window is on top.
  • activity.instances
    How many instances launched.
  • activity.new
    How many running instances with new Journal entity.
  • activity.resumed
    How many running instances with resumed Journal entity.
  • activity.buddies
    Number of buddies Activity is interacting with for all running instances.
• system
  System related stats.
  • system.uptime
    System uptime value.
  • system.diskfree
    How many storage space is free on the main disk.

Implementation

Monitor

The usage statistics will be gathered by sniffing DBus and X11 messages in the sugar-client program launched with the monitor command. The sugar-client will stay in daemon mode, and send collected and filtered data to the sugar-server, or, will keep it for later collection in server-less environments.

Journal crawler

In addition to the realtime monitoring, it might be useful to collect some stats from the Journal. It should be possible to run this code on a client side, or, on school servers using Journal backups.

This feature was implemented in Paraguay, but is not being used right now.

See also

• Paraguayan Activity usage analysis basing on Journal records.
• Australian request for statistics gathering.