Add Analytics to measure usage

[MCBoarder289]

Preface

I'd like to be able to measure usage of the app, but after doing research, also not use any third party analytics because I want to respect privacy as much as possible.

Need to add in the help docs what we're tracking so we're transparent. For the app to be useful at all, your Goodreads data would need to be public anyway, so we are not tracking anything that isn't publicly available. Still want to be transparent though about what is stored.

The solution needs to be:

• Cheap and scalable (unless it starts to get used a ton, I'd like to keep it free, but also be able to scale with more usage)
• Privacy-first (care less about an individual, more about overall usage - shelf data may be helpful for ML recommendations as a future-state feature)

Implementation Ideas

• Supabase Postgres DB
  • Not finding any other great "free tier" databases
  • This would need to be kept alive through usage once a week
  • With postgres, easy to transfer to something I roll on my own if needed.
• Single "Event" table which simply writes a record when "Get Data" form submission is sent. It should contain:
  • Shelf URL
    • Proxy for users. Nothing preventing a user from picking form other public shelves, but a good anchor value
    • Could be used later to see what books are being searched (obviously a point in time as the shelves can change)
  • Timestamp of the event
    • Could also maybe store the start and end time to get an idea for performance
  • Number of books returned
    • Could be correlated to parsing time
  • Stretch Maybe store the book data too? As well as what was randomly selected?
    • Might be too much data
• Stretch Track Library Searches
  • What libraries are being searched most?
  • Are people searching Libby or Physical books more often?
• Aggregate tables to be exposed to a new page on the app (30-60-90 day trends?)
  • Could be a stored procedure? Or simply a view?
  • If a stored proc, then maybe it saves daily counts in an aggregate table
  • Exposed view shows some high level charts that simply pull from the database

[MCBoarder289]

Maybe look into using a free SNS and Lambda architecture, that way we simply fire-and-forget, but don't compute on the BE server?

• Lambda - 1M requests per month free
• SNS - 1M requests per month free

Invoke a lambda from a SNS topic: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/example_serverless_SNS_Lambda_section.html

[MCBoarder289]

Talks about SNS -> SQS -> Lambda for more control over the queuing: https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/comments/11jwjnd/when_to_use_what_sns_sqs_lambda_vs_sns_lambda/

[MCBoarder289]

Deploying AWS Lambda via Docker (should be free if the repository is the public one and not a private one): https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/python-image.html#python-image-instructions

[MCBoarder289]

Publishing to SNS
SNS Github example
SNS to SQS
SQS to Lambda