Setup Dashboard Analytics

Last updated: 11 minutes read.

To enable Dashboard Analytics, you would need to configure Tyk Pump to send analytic data to the Dashboard storage MongoDB / SQL.

These are the different pumps that handle different kinds of analytic data.

Analytics Activities Graph Log Browser Uptime Analytics
Mongo (Multi organisation) Mongo Aggregate Pump Mongo Selective Pump Uptime Pump
Mongo (Single organisation) Mongo Aggregate Pump Mongo Pump Uptime Pump
SQL SQL Aggregate Pump SQL Pump Uptime Pump

See below details about these pumps, their configs, matching collections and relevant dashboard setting, to view this data.

1. Mongo Pump

mongo Pump simply saves all individual requests across every organisation to a collection called tyk_analytics. Each request will be stored as a single document.

Pump Config

{
  ...
  "pumps": { 
    "mongo": {
      "type": "mongo",
      "meta": {
        "collection_name": "tyk_analytics",
        "mongo_url": "mongodb://username:password@{hostname:port},{hostname:port}/{db_name}"
      }
    }
}

Capping

This collection should be capped due to the number of individual documents. This is especially important if the detailed_recording in the Gateway is turned on which means that the Gateway records the full payload of the request and response.

Omitting Indexes

From Pump 1.6+, the Mongo Pumps indexes default behaviour is changed and the new configuration option omit_index_creation is available. This option is applicable to the following Pumps: Mongo Pump,Mongo Aggregate Pump and Mongo Selective Pump.

The behaviour now depends upon the value of ‘omit_index_creation’ and the Pump in use, as follows:

  • If omit_index_creation is set to true, tyk-pump will not create any indexes (for Mongo pumps).
  • If omit_index_creation is set to false (default) and you are using DocumentDB, tyk-pump will create the Mongo indexes.
  • If omit_index_creation is set to false (default) and you are using MongoDB, the behaviour of tyk-pump depends upon whether the collection already exists:
    • If the collection exists, tyk-pump will not create the indexes again.
    • If the collection does not already exist, tyk-pump will create the indexes.

Dashboard Setting

In API Usage Data > Log Browser screen you will see all the individual requests that the Gateway has recorded and saved in tyk_analytics collection using the mongo pump.

Because you have the option to store and display analytics of every organisation or separately per organisation, you need to configure the Tyk Dashboard with the matching setting according to the way you set the pump to store the data in MongoDB. The field use_sharded_analytics controlls the collection that the dashboard will query.

  • If use_sharded_analytics: false - the dashboard will query the collection that tyk_analytics mongo pump populated
  • If use_sharded_analytics: true - the dashboard will query the collection that mongo-pump-selective pump populated

2. Mongo Aggregate Pump

mongo-pump-aggregate pump stores data in a collection called z_tyk_analyticz_aggregate_{ORG ID}.

Pump Config

{
  ...
  "pumps": {
    "mongo-pump-aggregate": {
      "name": "mongo-pump-aggregate",
      "meta": {
        "mongo_url": "mongodb://username:password@{hostname:port},{hostname:port}/{db_name}",
        "use_mixed_collection": true
      }
    }
  }
}
  • use_mixed_collection: true - will store analytics to both your organisation defined collections z_tyk_analyticz_aggregate_{ORG ID} and your org-less tyk_analytics_aggregates collection.
  • use_mixed_collection: false- your pump will only store analytics to your org defined collection.

tyk_analytics_aggregates collection is used to query analytics across your whole Tyk setup. This can be used, for example, by a superuser role that is not attached to an organisation. When set to true, you also need to set use_sharded_analytics to true in your Dashboard config.

Dashboard Setting

This pump supplies the data for the following sub categories API Usage Data:

  • Activity by API screen
  • Activity by Key screen
  • Errors screen

As with the regular analytics, because Tyk gives you the option to store and display aggregated analytics across all organisations or separately per organisation, you need to configure the Tyk Dashboard with the matching setting according to the way to set the pump to store the data in MongoDB, otherwise, you won’t see the data in the Dashboard.

  1. The enable_aggregate_lookups: true field must be set in the Dashboard configuration file, in order for the Dashboard to query and display the aggregated data that mongo-pump-aggregate saved to MongoDB.

  2. If you set use_mixed_collection: true in the pump, you also need to set use_sharded_analytics: true in your Dashboard config.

Capping

As a minimal number of documents get stored, you don’t need to worry about capping this. The documents contain aggregate info across an individual API, such as total requests, errors, tags and more.

High Traffic Environment Settings

If you have a high traffic environment, and you want to ignore aggregations to avoid Mongo overloading and/or reduce aggregation documents size, you can do it using the ignore_aggregations configuration option. The possible values are:

  • APIID
  • Errors
  • Versions
  • APIKeys
  • OauthIDs
  • Geo
  • Tags
  • Endpoints
  • KeyEndpoint
  • OauthEndpoint
  • ApiEndpoint

For example, if you want to ignore the API Keys aggregations:

pump.conf:

{
  ...
  "pumps": {
    "mongo-pump-aggregate": {
      "name": "mongo-pump-aggregate",
      "meta": {
        "mongo_url": "mongodb://username:password@{hostname:port},{hostname:port}/{db_name}",
        "use_mixed_collection": true,
        "ignore_aggregations": ["APIKeys"]
      }
    }
  }
}

Unique Aggregation Points

In case you set your API definition in the Tyk Gateway to tag unique headers (like request_id or timestamp), this collection can grow a lot since agregation of unique value simply creates a record/document for every single value with counter of 1. To mitigate this, avoid tagging unique headers as first option. If you can’t change the API definition quickly, you can add the tag to the ignore list "ignore_aggregations": ["request_id"]. This will make sure that pump does not aggregate per request_id.
Also, if you are not sure what’s causing the growth of the collection, you can also set time capping on these collections and monitor them.

3. Mongo Selective Pump

mongo-pump-selective pump stores individual requests per organisation in collections called z_tyk_analyticz_{ORG ID}. Similar to the regular mongo pump, Each request will be stored as a single document.

Pump Config

This collection should be capped due to the number of individual documents.

{
  ...
  "pumps": {
    "mongo-pump-selective": {
      "name": "mongo-pump-selective",
      "meta": {
        "mongo_url": "mongodb://username:password@{hostname:port},{hostname:port}/{db_name}",
        "use_mixed_collection": true
      }
    }
  }
}

Capping

This collection should be capped due to the number of individual documents.

Dashboard Setting

As with the regular analytics, if you are using the Selective pump, you need to set use_sharded_keys: true in the dashboard config file so it will query z_tyk_analyticz_{ORG ID} collections to populate the Log Browser.

4. Uptime Tests Analytics

Pump Configuration

"uptime_pump_config": {
    "collection_name": "tyk_uptime_analytics",
    "mongo_url": "mongodb://tyk-mongo:27017/tyk_analytics",
  },

Tyk Dashboard Configuration

  “storage” : {
    ...
    “uptime”: {
      "type": "postgres",
      "connection_string": "user=root password=admin database=tyk-demo-db host=tyk-db port=5432",
    }
  }
}

Tyk Gateway Setting

To enable Uptime Pump, modify gateway configuration enable_uptime_analytics to true.

When using one of our supported SQL platforms, Tyk offers 3 types of SQL pumps:

  1. Aggregated Analytics: sql_aggregate
  2. Raw Logs Analytics: sql
  3. Uptime Tests Analytics

In a production environment we recommend sharding. You can configure your analytics in the following ways:

  • Sharding raw logs
  • Sharding aggregated analytics
  • Sharding uptime tests

1. SQL Pump

While aggregated analytics offer a decent amount of details, there are use cases when you’d like to have access to all request details in your analytics. For that you can generate analytics based on raw logs. This is especially helpful when, once you have all the analytics generated based on raw logs stored in your SQL database, you can then build your own custom metrics, charts etc. outside of your Tyk Dashboard, that maybe bring more value to your product.

The pump needed for storing logs data in the database is very similar to other pumps as well as the storage setting in Tyk Dashboard config. It just requires the sql name and database specific configuration options.

SQL Pump Configuration

For storing logs into the tyk_analytics database table.

"sql": {
  "name": "sql",
  "meta": {
    "type": "postgres",
    "connection_string": "host=localhost port=5432 user=admin dbname=postgres_test password=test",
    "table_sharding": false
  }
}

type - The supported types are sqlite and postgres.

connection_string - Specifies the connection string to the database. For example, for sqlite it will be the path/name of the database, and for postgres, specifying the host, port, user, password, and dbname.

log_level - Specifies the SQL log verbosity. The possible values are: info,error and warning. By default, the value is silent, which means that it won’t log any SQL query.

table_sharding - Specifies if all the analytics records are going to be stored in one table or in multiple tables (one per day). By default, it is set to false.

If table_sharding is false, all the records are going to be stored in the tyk_analytics table. If set to true, daily records are stored in a tyk_analytics_YYYYMMDD date formatted table.

Dashboard Setting

In API Usage Data > Log Browser screen you will see all the individual requests that the Gateway has recorded and saved in tyk_analytics collection using the sql pump.

Make sure you have configured dashboard with your SQL database connection settings:

{
  ...
  "storage" : {
    ...
    "analytics": {
      "type": "postgres",
      "connection_string": "user=root password=admin host=tyk-db database=tyk-demo-db port=5432",
    }
  }
}

2. SQL Aggregate Pump

This is the default option offered by Tyk, because it is configured to store the most important analytics details which will satisfy the needs of most of our clients. This allows your system to save database space and reporting is faster, consuming less resources.

SQL Aggregate Pump Configuration

For storing logs into the tyk_aggregated database table.

"sql_aggregate": {
  "name": "sql_aggregate",
  "meta": {
    "type": "postgres",
    "connection_string": "host=localhost port=5432 user=admin dbname=postgres_test password=test",
    "table_sharding": true
  }
}

type - The supported types are sqlite and postgres.

connection_string - Specifies the connection string to the database. For example, for sqlite it will be the path/name of the database, and for postgres, specifying the host, port, user, password, and dbname.

log_level - Specifies the SQL log verbosity. The possible values are: info, error, and warning. By default, the value is silent, which means that it won’t log any SQL query.

track_all_paths - Specifies if it should store aggregated data for all the endpoints. By default, it is set to false, which means that it only stores aggregated data for tracked endpoints.

ignore_tag_prefix_list - Specifies prefixes of tags that should be ignored.

table_sharding - Specifies if all the analytics records are going to be stored in one table or in multiple tables (one per day). By default, it is set to false.

If table_sharding is false, all the records are going to be stored in the tyk_aggregated table. If set to true, daily records are stored in a tyk_aggregated_YYYYMMDD date formatted table.

Dashboard Setting

This pump supplies the data for the following sub categories API Usage Data:

  • Activity by API screen
  • Activity by Key screen
  • Errors screen

As with the regular analytics, because Tyk gives you the option to store and display aggregated analytics across all organisations or separately per organisation, you need to configure the Tyk Dashboard with the matching setting according to the way to set the pump to store the data in SQL, otherwise, you won’t see the data in the Dashboard.

  1. The enable_aggregate_lookups: true field must be set in the Dashboard configuration file, in order for the Dashboard to query and display the aggregated data that sql-aggregate saved to database.

  2. Make sure you have configured dashboard with your SQL database connection settings:

{
  ...
  "storage" : {
    ...
    "analytics": {
      "type": "postgres",
      "connection_string": "user=root password=admin host=tyk-db database=tyk-demo-db port=5432",
    }
  }
}

3. SQL Uptime Pump

In an uptime_pump_config section, you can configure a SQL uptime pump. To do that, you need to add the field uptime_type with sql value.

"uptime_pump_config": {
  "uptime_type": "sql",
  "type": "postgres",
  "connection_string": "host=sql_host port=sql_port user=sql_usr dbname=dbname password=sql_pw",
  "table_sharding": false
},

type - The supported types are sqlite and postgres.

connection_string - Specifies the connection string to the database. For example, for sqlite it will be the path/name of the database, and for postgres, specifying the host, port, user, password, and dbname.

table_sharding - Specifies if all the analytics records are going to be stored in one table or in multiple tables (one per day). By default, it is set to false.

If table_sharding is false, all the records are going to be stored in the tyk_analytics table. If set to true, daily records are stored in a tyk_analytics_YYYYMMDD date formatted table.

Tyk Dashboard Configuration

You need to set enable_aggregate_lookups to false

Then add your SQL database connection settings:

{
  ...
  “storage” : {
    ...
    “analytics”: {
      "type": "postgres",
      "connection_string": "user=root password=admin host=tyk-db database=tyk-demo-db port=5432",
    }
  }
}

4. Uptime Tests Analytics

Tyk Pump Configuration

For storing logs into the tyk_aggregated database table.

"uptime_pump_config": {
  "uptime_type": "sql",
  "type": "postgres",
  "connection_string": "host=sql_host port=sql_port user=sql_usr database=tyk-demo-db password=sql_pw",
},

Tyk Dashboard Configuration

  “storage” : {
    ...
    “uptime”: {
      "type": "postgres",
      "connection_string": "user=root password=admin database=tyk-demo-db host=tyk-db port=5432",
    }
  }
}

Tyk Gateway Setting

To enable Uptime Pump, modify gateway configuration enable_uptime_analytics to true.

Sharding

In a production environment we recommend the following setup:

By default all logs/analytics are being stored in one single database table, which makes it hard and less performant to execute CRUD operations on the dataset when it grows significantly.

In order to improve the data maintenance processes, as querying or removing data from one single table is slow, we have added a new option (table_sharding), so that the data can be stored on a daily basis (one table of data per day), which will automatically make querying or removing sets of data easier, whether dropping tables for removing logs/analytics, or reading multiple tables based on the selected period.

Tyk Pump Configuration

"sql": {
  ...
  "meta": {
    ...
    "table_sharding": true
  }
},
"sql_aggregate" : {
  ...
  "meta": {
    ...
    "table_sharding": true
  }
},
"uptime_pump_config": {
  ...
  "table_sharding": true
},

Tyk Dashboard Configuration

"sql": {
  ...
  "meta": {
    ...
    "table_sharding": true
  }
},
"sql_aggregate" : {
  ...
  "meta": {
    ...
    "table_sharding": true
  }
},
"uptime_pump_config": {
  ...
  "table_sharding": true
},