Google Analytics exclude empty custom variable in a custom report - regex

I have a custom variable set for all visitors; for our registered users it's some value, for unregistered users, it's empty.
I can find unregistered users in an advanced segment using the settings Exclude Custom Variable (Value 02) Matching Regexp .+ -- works brilliantly.
But I need a report of unregistered visitors for a dashboard, and tried to do the same thing with a filter. I have a metric of Visits and a dimension of something all vistors will have (e.g. Browser). My filter is identical to the one in the advanced segment, but ... not brilliant. I get no visits. I have tried to Include with a regex ^$ but no love there, either.
Any ideas what I am doing wrong?

To understand your problem and the solution yourself, let me illustrate how the data recording works in any collection process (Google Anlaytics is one of the tools used for data collection and analysis):
To record and analyse data, you first decide what you want to record, and then how. Maybe this how is where Google Analytics comes in for you. So, the data that you want to see is the metric, it can have a name and a (usually numeric) value, and each dimension is how you want to separate or drill down into the various views of the data. As an example, if you want to know how many visitors visited your site everyday, and you want to be able to see through which source they came, Daily Visitor Count is your metric and Source is your dimension.
The important thing to understand here is that Dimensions and Metrics are not bound together. What I mean here is that just because you decided that Daily Visitor Counts should be viewable by Source, doesn't add a source to every updation of the Daily Visitor Count metric. In order to view the metric by the dimenision, you need to update a value for the dimension every time you record the metric.
If you don't record a dimension for a metric, then you cannot obtain the value of the metrics for which you didn't record a dimension by applying a filter on the dimension. Because, using a dimension filter only lets you access the values recorded for the dimension, and not all metrics, because, dimensions don't contain values of metrics, only metrics can optionally contain values for dimensions.
So when you query "dimension equals regex +*", it works, with both include and exclude, but you cannot query metrics with empty dimension using a dimensional filter. The best way would be to only add a standard or default value for the dimension every time you record the metric so that you can separate, something like (not set) or unknown.
Hope that helps. :)
I just hope you understand what you were trying to do is conceptually wrong, though it could still have been made technically feasible.

Related

DAX function to get specific value from dimension?

I have a model with DimCustomer, DimSegment and FactRevenue.
For most cases each customer is associated with a single segment.
There are a handful of Customers, that have two Segments… Therefore, in FactRevenue a few few cases of Customers have two Segments associated…
I want to “override” it and display 'current segment' only using FactRevenue (I don’t have a connection between DimCustomer and DimSegment)
Do I have any tools in DAX to achieve this?
Is it viable to have a mapped list of this exceptions and hardcode it somehow?

what is the right way to query different filters on dynamodb?

I save my order data on dyanmodb table. And the partition key is orderId, sort key is timestamp. Each order has many other attributes like category, userName, price, items, status`. I am going to build a filter service to let clients query order based on these attributes. Also I'd like to add a limit on the query for pagination. But I find some limitations on dynamodb.
In order to support querying different fields, I have two options:
Create GSI for each attribute. It is very expensive but it supports query each attribute very performance. This solution doesn't support combine multiple attributes in the filter.
Attach a filter expression on the SCAN to include attribute condition. SCAN is not very performance in the first place. Also the filter expression is applied after limits. Which means it is very likely to response less than users request limits.
so what is the good way to achieve this in dynamodb?
There is unfortunately no magic way to solve your problems. There is no DynamoDB feature which you missed. Indeed, as you said, making each of the attributes available for efficient queries requires a GSI which will cost you additional money - but that's reasonable. Indeed, as you said, there is no efficient way to search for an intersection of requirements on two different attribute. And indeed, the "limit" feature doesn't quite do what you want and you'll need to emulate your page size need in the client code (asking for more pages until your desired amount is recieved), potentially with unacceptably high latency.
It sounds that what you really need is a search engine. These have exactly the features that you asked for. You'll still be paying for these features (indexing of individual columns still takes up CPU and disk space, intersection of multiple attribute searches still requires significant work at query time) but search engines are designed for exactly these operations, and do them more efficiently and with lower latency (which is important for interactive searches, which are the bread-and-butter of search engines).
You can add the limit for pagination using the limit attribute in the query. But can you please be more specific about your access patterns, is your clients going to query all the orders or only the orders belonging to them ?

Kibana: can I store "Time" as a variable and run a consecutive search?

I want to automate a few search in one, here are the steps:
Search in Kibana for this ID:"b2c729b5-6440-4829-8562-abd81991e2a0" which will return me a bunch of logs. Of these logs I need to take the first and the last timestamp:
I now would like to store these two data FROM: September 3rd 2019, 21:28:22.155, TO: September 3rd 2019, 21:28:23.524 in 2 variables
Run a second search in Kibana for the word "fail" in between these two variable of time
How to automate the whole process without need of copy/paste and running a second query?
EDIT:
SHORT STORY LONG: I work in a company that produce a software for autonomous vehicles.
SCENARIO: A booking is rejected and we need to understand why.
WHERE IS THE PROBLE: I need to monitor just a few seconds of logs on 3 different machines. Each log is completely separated, there is no relation between the logs so I cannot write a query in discover, I need to run 3 separated queries.
EXAMPLE:
A booking was rejected, so I open Chrome and I search on "elk-prod.myhost.com" for the BookingID:"b2c729b5-6440-4829-8562-abd81991e2a0" and I have a dozen of logs returned during a range of 2 seconds (FROM: September 3rd 2019, 21:28:22.155, TO: September 3rd 2019, 21:28:23.524).
Now I need to know what was happening on the car so I open a new Chrome tab and I search on "elk-prod.myhost.com" for the CarID: "Tesla-45-OU" on the time range FROM: September 3rd 2019, 21:28:22.155, TO: September 3rd 2019, 21:28:23.524
Now I need to know why the server which calculate the matching rejected the booking so I open a new Chrome tab and I search for the word CalculationMatrix always on the time range FROM: September 3rd 2019, 21:28:22.155, TO: September 3rd 2019, 21:28:23.524
CONCLUSION: I want to stop to keep opening Chrome tabs by hand and automate the whole thing. I have no idea around what time the book was made so I first need to search for the BookingID "b2c729b5-6440-4829-8562-abd81991e2a0", then store the timestamp of first and last log and run a second and third query based on those timestamps.
There is no relation between the 3 logs I search so there is no way to filter from the Discover, I need to automate 3 different query.
Here is how I would do it. First of all, from what I understand, you have three different indexes:
one for "bookings"
one for "cars"
one for "matchings"
First, in Discover, I would create three Saved Searches, one per index pattern. Then in Visualize, I would create a Vertical bar chart on the bookings saved search (Bucket X-Axis by date_histogram on the timestamp field, leave the rest as is). You'll get a nice histogram of all your booking events bucketed by time.
Finally, I would create a dashboard and add the vertical bar chart + those three saved searches inside it.
When done, the way I would search according to the process you've described above is as follows:
Search for the booking ID b2c729b5-6440-4829-8562-abd81991e2a0 in the top filter bar. In the bar chart histogram (bookings), you will see all documents related to the selected booking. On that chart, you can select the exact period from when the very first booking document happened to the very last. This will adapt the main time picker at the top and the start/end time will be "remembered" by Kibana
Remove the booking ID from the top filter (since we now know the time range and Kibana stores it). Search for Tesla-45-OU in the top filter bar. The bar histogram + the booking saved search + the matchings saved search will be empty, but you'll have data inside the second list, the one for cars. Find whatever you need to find in there and go to the next step.
Remove the car ID from the top filter and search for ComputationMatrix. Now the third saved search is going to show you whatever documents you need to see within that time range.
I'm lacking realistic data to try this out, but I definitely think this is possible as I've laid out above, probably with some adaptations.
Kibana does work like this (any order is ok):
Select time filter: https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/kibana/current/set-time-filter.html
Add additional criteria for search like for example field s is b2c729b5-6440-4829-8562-abd81991e2a0.
Add aditional criteria for search like for example field x is Fail.
Additionaly you can view surrounding documents https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/kibana/current/document-context.html#document-context
This is how Kibana works.
You can prepare some filters beforehands, save them and then use them if you want to automate the process of discovering somehow.
You can do that in Discover tab in Kibana using New/Save/Open options.
Edit:
I do not think you can achieve what you need in Kibana. As I mentioned earlier one option is to change the data that is comming to Elasticsearch so you can search for it via discover in Kibana. Another option could be builiding for example Java application, that is using Elasticsearch - then you can write algorithm that returns the data that you want. But i think it's a big overhead and I recommend checking the data first.
Edit: To clarify - you can create external Java let's say SpringBoot application that uses Elasticsearch - all the data that you need is inside it.
But in this option you will not use Kibana at all.
You can export the result to csv or what you want in the code.
SpringBoot application can ask ElasticSearch for whatever it needs, then it would be easy to store these time variables inside of Java code.
EDIT: After OP edited question to change it dramatically:
#FrancescoMantovani Well the edited version is very different from where you first posted here How to automate the whole process without need of copy/paste and running a second query? and search for word fail in a single shot. In accepted answer you are still using a three filters one at a time so it is not one search, but three.
What's more if you would use one index, and send data from multiple hosts via filebeat you don't even to have to create this dashboard to do that. Then you can you can select the exact period from when the very first document happened to the very last regarding filter and then remove it and add another filter that you need - it's simple as that. Before you were writing about one query,
How to automate the whole process without need of copy/paste and
running a second query?
not three. And you don't need to open new tab in Chrome each time you want to change filter just organize the data by for example using filebeat as mentioned before.
There is no relation between the 3 logs
From what you wrote the realation exist and it is time.
If the data is in for example three diferent indicies (cause documents don't have much similiar data) you can do it like that:
You change them easily in dicover see:
You can go to discover select index 1 search, select time range that you need, when you change index the time range is still the one you selected, you only need to change filter - you will get what you need.

Better method for querying DynamoDB table randomly?

I've included some links along with our approaches to other answers, which seem to be the most optimal on the web right now.
Our records need to be categorized (eg. "horror", "thriller", "tv"), and randomly accessible both in specific categories and across all/some categories. We generally need to access about 20 - 100 items at a time. We also have a smallish number of categories (less than 100).
We write to the database for uploading/removing content, although this is done in batches and does not need to be real time.
We have tried two different approaches, with two different data structures.
Approach 1
AWS DynamoDB - Pick a record/item randomly?
Help selecting nth record in query.
In short, using the category as a hash key, and a UUID as the sort key. Generate a random UUID, query Dynamo using greater than or less than, and limit to 1. This is even suggested by an AWS employee in the second link. (We've also tried increasing the limit to the number of items we need, but this increases the probability of the query failing the first time around).
Issues with this approach:
First query can fail if it is greater than/less than any of the UUIDs
Querying on any specific category will cause throttling at scale (Small number of partitions)
We've also considered adding a suffix to each category to artificially increase the number of partitions we have, as pointed out in the following link.
AWS Database Blog
Choosing the Right DynamoDB Partition Key
Approach 2
Amazon Web Services: How do we get random item from the dynamoDb's table?
Doing something similar to this, where we concatenate the category with a sequential number, and use this as the hash key. e.g. horror-000001.
By knowing the number of records in each category, we're able to perform random queries across our entire data set, while also avoiding hot partitions/keys.
Issues with this approach
We need a secondary data structure to manage the sequential counts across each category
Writing (especially deleting) is significantly more complex, although this doesn't need to happen in real time.
Conclusion
Both approaches solve our main use case of random queries on category/categories, but the cons they offer are really deterring us from using them. We're leaning more towards approach #1 using suffixes to solve the hot partitioning issue, although we would need the additional retry logic for failed queries.
Is there a better way of approaching this problem? Specifically looking for solutions capable of scaling well (No scan), without requiring extra resources be implemented. #1 fits the bill, but needing to manage suffixes and failed attempts really deters us from using it, especially when it is being called inside a lambda (billed for time used).
Thanks!
Follow Up
After more research and testing, my team has decided to move towards MySQL hosted on RDS for these tables. We learned that this is one of the few use cases were DynamoDB does not fit, and requires rewriting your use case to fit the DB (Bad).
We felt that the extra complexity required to integrate random sampling on DynamoDB wasn't worth it, and we were unable to come up with any comparable solutions. We are, however, sticking with DynamoDB for our tables that do not need random accessibility due to the price and response times.
For anyone wondering why we chose MySQL, it was largely due to the Nodejs library available, great online resources (which DynamoDB definitely lacks), easy integration via RDS with our Lambdas, and the option to migrate to Amazons Aurora database.
We also looked at PostgreSQL, but we weren't as happy with the client library or admin tools, and we believe that MySQL will suit our needs for these tables.
If anybody has anything else they'd like to add or a specific question please leave a comment or send me a message!
This was too long for a comment, and I guess it's pretty much a full fledged answer now.
Approach 2
I've found that my typical time to get a single item from dynamodb to a host in the same region is <10ms. As long as you're okay with at most 1-2 extra calls, you can quite easily implement approach 2.
If you use a keys only GSI where the category is your hash key and the primary key of the table is your range key, you can quickly find the largest numbered single item within a category.
When you add a new item, find the largest number for that category from the GSI and then write the new item to the table with sequence number n+1.
When you delete, find the item with the largest sequence number for that category from the GSI, overwrite the item you are deleting, and then delete the now duplicated item from its position at the highest sequence number.
To randomly get an item, query the GSI to find the highest numbered item in the category, and then randomly pick a number since you now know the valid range.
Approach 1
I'm not sure exactly what you mean when you say "without requiring extra resources to be implemented". If you're okay with using a managed resource (no dev work to implement), you can also make Approach 1 work by putting a DAX cluster in front of your dynamodb table. Then you can query to your heart's content without really worrying about hot partitions. (Though the caching layer means that new/deleted items won't be reflected right away.)

AWS Data Structure and Stack Suggestion for highly filterable data

Firstly, let me know if I should place this in a different Community. It is programming related but less than I would prefer.
I am creating a mobile app based which I intend to base on AWS App Sync unless I can determine it is a poor fit.
I want to store a fairly large set of data, say a half million records.
From these records, I need to be able to grab all entries based on a tag and page them from the larger set.
An example of this data would be:
{
"name":"Product123",
"tags":[
{
"name":"1880",
"type":"year",
"value":7092
},
{
"name":"f",
"type":"gender",
"value":4120692
}
]
}
Various objects may or may not have a specific tag but may have up to 500 tags or more (the seed of initial data has 130 tags). My filter would ignore them if they did not match but return them if they did.
In reading about Query vs Scan on DyanmoDB, I feel like my current data structure would require mostly scanning and be in-efficient. Efficiency is only a real restriction due to cost.
With cost in mind, I will focus on the cost per user to access this data in filtered sets. Say 100,000 users for now each filtering and paging data many times a day.
Your concept of tags doesn't sound too different from the concept of Cognito User Pools' groups with AppSync (docs) - authentication based on groups will only return items allowed for groups that the user making the request is in. Cognito's default group limit is 25 per user pool, so while convenient out of the box, it wouldn't itself help you much. Instead, it's interesting just because it's similar conceptually, and can give you insight by looking at how it works internally.
If you go into the AppSync console and set up a request mapping template for groups auth, you'll see that it uses a scan and the contains operation. Doing something similar would probably be your best bet here, if you really want to use Dynamo. If you find that prohibitively costly, you could use a Lambda data source, which allows you to use any data store, if you have one in mind that's a little more flexible for this type of action.