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WIP: Current design subject to changes |
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Introduction
It is clear that there is the need for the platform to provide some statistics about the usage of the data within synapse: discussions around various aspects and statistics to gather and expose have been going on for several years.
There are different statistics that the synapse projects owner and administrators are currently interested in and different levels of understanding of what should be exposed by the API. In particular there are 3 main points of discussion that are related but need clarifications:
- Downloads Count
- Page Views
- Data Breaches/Audit Trail
Downloads Count
This is the main statistic that the users are currently looking for, it provides a way for project owners, funders and data contributor to monitor the interest over time in the datasets published in a particular project, which then reflects on the interest on the project itself and it is a metric of the value provided by the data in the project. This kind of data is related specifically to the usage of the platform by synapse users, since without being authenticated the downloads are not available. This is part of a generic category of statistics that relates to the entities and metadata that is stored in the backend and it's only a subset of aggregate statistic that can be exposed (e.g. number of projects, users, teams etc).
Page Views
This metric is also an indicator to monitor the interest but it plays a different role and focuses on the general user activity over the synapse platform as a whole. While it might be an indicator for a specific project success it captures a different aspect that might span to different type of clients used to interface on the Synapse API and that include information about users that are not authenticated into synapse. For this particular aspect there are tools already integrated (E.g. google analytics) that collect analytics on the user interactions. Note however that this information is not currently available to the synapse users, nor setup in a way to produce information about specific projects pages, files, wikis etc.
Data Breaches/Audit Trail
Another aspect that came out and might seem related is the identification of when/what/why of potential data breaches (e.g. a dataset was released even though it was not supposed to). This relates to the audit trail of users activity in order to identify potential offenders. While this information is crucial it should not be exposed by the API, and a due process is in place in order to access this kind of data.
Project Statistics
With this brief introduction in mind this document focuses on the main driving use case, that is:
- A funder and/or project creator would like to have a way to understand if the project is successful and if its data is used.
There are several metrics that can be used in order to determine the usage and success of a project, among which:
- Project Access (e.g. page views)
- Number of Downloads
- Number of Uploads
- User Discussions
Current Situation
Currently the statistics about a project are collected in various ways mostly through the DW, using /wiki/spaces/DW/pages/796819457 of the data collected to run ad-hoc queries for aggregations as well as through dedicated clients (See Synapse Usage Report).
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Files, Downloads and Uploads
Files in synapse are referenced through an abstraction (FileHandle) that maintain the information about the link to the content of the file itself (e.g. an S3 bucket). A file handle is then referenced in many places (such as FileEntity and WikiPage, see FileHandleAssociateType) as pointers to the actual file content. In order to actually download the content the synapse platform allows to generated a pre-signed url (according to the location where the file is stored) that can be used to directly download the file. Note that the platform has no way to guarantee that the pre-signed url is actually used by the client in order to download a file. Every single pre-signed url request in the codebase comes down to a single method getURLForFileHandle.
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DownloadStatistics/UploadStatistics
| Property | Type | Description |
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| lastUpdatedOn | Date | Contains the last update date for the download/upload statistics, this value provide an approximation on the freshness of the statistics |
| monthly | ARRAY<StatisticsCountBucket> | An array containing the values for this aggregate for the last 12 months, each bucket aggregates a month worth of data. The number of buckets is limited to 12. Each bucket will include the unique users count for the month (In the extra.usersCount property) |
StatisticsCountBucket
The purpose of this object is to include information about the count of a certain metric within a specific time frame, that may include extra information about this specific bucket in the extra property:
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| Method | Endpoint | Request Body | Response Body | Description | Restrictions |
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| POST | /asynchronous/job | AsynchronousJobStatus: the responseBody property in the status will contain the ProjectStatisticsResponse | Allows to submit a job to gather the download statistics for a project. The id returned by the request is used in order to get the job status. |
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| GET | /asynchronous/job/{id} | N/A | AsynchronousJobStatus | Allows to get the current status of the statistics job with the given id. |
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