Events tracked via Resque never appear

[shipstar]

I have a tracking job that I'm enqueueing via Resque. It's a fairly simple passthrough to Analytics.track:

# in an after_filter
def track_event
  Resque.enqueue MyAnalytics::Event,
    user_id: current_user.id,
    event: 'Created a thing',
    properties: { company_id: current_user.company_id }
end

module MyAnalytics
  class Event
    @queue = 'my_analytics'

    def self.perform(opts)
      Analytics.track opts.with_indifferent_access
    end
  end
end

However, I'm never seeing these statistics show up in Segment.io or any of the connected accounts.

Per the documentation, I also tried with

def self.after_perform(opts)
  Analytics.flush
end

but that just sits there for about a minute, then appears to timeout.

If I call Analytics.track directly in a console or in that after_filter, it works as expected.

Any thoughts? Am I doing something horribly wrong?

[calvinfo]

I'm less familiar with Resque, but do your workers run in new processes or threads? If that's the case, you'll have to call Analytics.init before running any sort of track commands since it spawns a separate thread to process the messages.

Analytics.flush shouldn't work for a minute in that case though, it should just exit immediately if there aren't any messages to be processed

Here's the code another one of our users have implemented:

module Segment
  module Tracking

    def self.perform(action, data)
      data.symbolize_keys!
      data.values.each { |v| v.symbolize_keys! if v.is_a? Hash }

      Analytics.init secret: APP_CONFIG[:segment_secret]
      Analytics.send action, data
      Analytics.flush
    end

    def track_event(name, properties)
      data = { user_id: current_user.id.to_s, event: name, properties: properties }
      Resque.enqueue Segment::Tracking, 'track', data
    end

    def identify_user(event)
      traits = { email: current_user.email,
                   name: current_user.name }

      data = { user_id: current_user.id.to_s, traits: traits }
      Resque.enqueue Segment::Tracking, 'identify', data
    end

  end
end

[shipstar]

Calling Analytics.init does solve this issue. I'll go ahead and close it.

For the record, whichever user wrote this code would probably benefit from the changes I made last night. It should prevent them from needing to symbolize keys. They're symbolizing recursively, which I didn't account for, but I think analytics-ruby only looks one level deep in the hash for its keys anyway.

Also, if they're using ActiveSupport (which it seems like they are based on the presence of symbolize_keys!), they should look into Hash#with_indifferent_access.

[shipstar]

It might be worth adding a small snippet somewhere in the documentation that specifically highlights the need to call Analytics.init when a new process/thread spins up. It's covered in the Passenger + Unicorn sections, but it didn't jump out at me with regard to Resque (although it's obvious in hindsight).

Thanks!