Hummingbird, Real Time Web Traffic Visualization | Hacker News Reader

Hummingbird, Real Time Web Traffic Visualization

projects.nuttnet.net

72 pointsboh17 comments

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.

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.

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!

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

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

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.

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!

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.

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.

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!).

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

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.

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?

Yeah - I think this is really pretty but think that in most cases looking at the small picture isn't half as useful as the big picture.

Both types of analysis have their place. The "small picture" is the most important picture to news organizations, for example. They want to know which news stories are trending right now to determine homepage placement and what content to focus on covering in the next few coming hours.

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.

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.

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