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Comment by error54 | Hacker News Reader

>"Corollary: No one needs real-time"

If you've ever run service where you're anticipating a large traffic spike and you need to monitor server stats, real-time statistics are invaluable.

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If you know exactly what you are waiting for and you know exactly what you will do when it happens, then you should probably automate and optimize that process instead of spending your time building some fancy graphics. And if you don't know what you are waiting for nor what you will do about it, you don't need real time metrics.

What if it's an event that happens infrequently, say 2 times year? In such cases, it wouldn't be worthwhile to spend the time automating when it's easier/cheaper to take manual action.

No, automation is always the answer. When you are forced to formalize processes with code you invariably find all sorts of hidden assumptions. This has happened to me every single time I've tried to automate legacy manual processes. There are always hidden assumptions that are unearthed. Unearthing hidden assumptions is always worth the effort.

http://xkcd.com/1319/

Or maybe http://xkcd.com/1205/

Total time spent on automating plus executing is not a very useful metric, because preparation time and reaction time are not interchangeable.

A hidden assumption behind what you wrote is that all automation is like the scripts you've written to automate your processes.

There are things which automating them would take lots of man-months and tens of thousands of dollars, so much that the effort is not worth it from the savings -- or from any "hidden assumptions" you discover.

You should also consider how much it costs you to miss a part of a process that is manually carried out but that could be automated. If it really expensive to miss something then automation might be a good idea even for simple tasks.

If it truly is not worth the automation, you still don't need real time dashboards, you just need an alarm.

The heuristic whether to use real-time information is the following and I am paraphrasing Avinash Kaushik:

"Will a decision be made in real-time based on this information?"

On this note, is it possible to set up real-time alerts with Google analytics? I'd like to set up an alert like "If the number of real-time simultaneous users rises above n, send an email to this address."

I don't believe it is possible, but it seems like an extremely useful feature.

precisely. try running a network of any appreciable throughput (10G+) with 5-minute averages.

Or you release a new version of a game and you notice your arpdau tanks. ;)

Or try to instrument any analytics - and wait to verify they show up in the dashboard correctly.

Or you are a small business owner who just likes to watch what the users are doing in realtime, for fun. Like my mom :)

He should have differentiated operational metrics from product (or business) metrics. He seems to be talking about the latter categories.

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