Countly Mobile Analytic Tool

Countly Blog

What’s new with Countly v13.06?

Countly gives a fresh breath to mobile analytics domain with its introduction of open source nature, extensive list of mobile, desktop and Facebook SDKs (10 as of this writing), best of breed user interface of its kind, and its dedication to respecting your privacy. Being the first on-premise, enterprise grade open source mobile analytics service, Countly is the only viable product with a focus on customizability, security and enterprise-readiness.

After 5 months of hard work, we have synched every line of code among Cloud, Community and Enterprise editions (while the building blocks are similar, there are 3 different branches). You can recognize some of the features were already available in Cloud, and they are now open sourced via Community Edition. In the future you’ll see many small enhancements in Cloud, get it widely accepted (and tested) by Cloud subscribers, and then made available to Community Edition.

Let’s see what’s new with our latest baby: 

Two new dashboard features

With the help of our new family member Hakkı Altuntaş, we started to implement Session Durations view that shows users categorized into predefined session duration buckets. In this view, your users are categorized into one of 0-10 seconds, 11-30 seconds, 31-60 seconds, 1-3 minutes, 3-10 minutes, 10-30 minutes, 30-60 minutes or > 1 hour according to this session duration. You do not need to do anything – it’s already accessible from Engagement > Session durations. Check it out! 

A few of our users asked for Resolutions, so we also implemented that view too. Now you can see detailed device resolution data, giving you insights on which screen types are most used with your application. Testing your app with these resolutions will give you an understanding of whether your users really see your app the way you want it to be (accessible from Analytics > Resolutions).

More efficiency and security

In an effort to increase efficiency and security, we added two nice features to core Countly: First, Countly now has cluster mechanism to fork api.js according to number of cores in the server in order to increase utilisation.  This can also be configured from api/config.js by changing “worker" count. Second, Countly dashboard and database can now be on two different servers. This can be done modifying host configuration in app.js and api.js configuration files (/frontend/express/config.js and /api/config.js).

Improved API 

Countly API is extending – in fact many features in our dashboard is available via API calls. That means you can also build your own dashboard, mobile application or even do some hacks with a Raspberry PI . In our new version, we added two new API paths that return ready-to-use metrics for today, 7 days and 30 days. The very same API applies to all 3 editions (Community, Cloud and Enterprise). For more information about our API, see Countly Server API reference.

Country and city database updater

Countly benefits from Maxmind’s database to make an IP to city conversion.  Starting from this version, we included a simple shell script to update your country and city database (/bin/geoip-updater.sh). Running this script, your system will have an up-to-date database. We leave it to the user how and with which frequency to run this script. After running the database, do not forget to restart Countly by running stop countly-supervisor and start countly-supervisor.

Other than those changes, there are several small visual enhancements on the dashboard to make navigation much more smoother. Events view has been revamped to increase performance and visual improvements. While Countly dashboard is one of the slickest user interfaces, we strive hard to make it simple to remove the mental burden on your shoulders.

What are we working on right now?

As some of you may have seen from our Twitter feed, we are actively working on Revenue Analytics. This has been asked for a few times and now we are building the most intuitive in-app purchase analytics service, tightly coupled with our dashboard. You’ll soon see your total revenue, average revenue per user, average revenue per paying user, paying/non-paying users and total paying users in your dashboard. Stay tuned!

 

Closing words and some usual information

• Hakkı Altuntaş is now our 4th member. He’s a hard-working, marathon runner and will be responsible of dashboard improvements. Countly is much more stronger with his expertise. Welcome, Hakkı!
• Our Github page keeps issues submitted by you. Feel free to send us pull requests, technical issues using your Github account.
• Support.count.ly can be considered as a more non-technical (or less code-oriented) place to discuss Countly. Many examples here are in the form of “will you support feature A?” or “how to do X?”. There are no strict rules here – if you are in doubt, send your questions to any of the issue trackers.

Some of you have been asking for our mobile analytics application. We have been working on it for some time and thought it would be available last month, but couldn’t. We are very sorry for that. We’re still developing and testing the final bits and hope to provide it to masses soon.  

Thanks for reading this far! :-)

— Countly Team