Improve Telemetry Server

[sanzoghenzo]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe

As talked about at the last online meetup, I was proposing to drop the current telemetry server and leverage the OpenTelemetry standard.

However, after a more thorough analysis, OpenTelemetry is overkill for the task, since it encompasses tracing, metrics and logging, but it does so in a slightly convoluted way.

So the alternative is to give the current telemetry implementation some love.

Describe the solution you'd like

• separate the building of the telemetry server from the other build
• don't build the server if the code pushed is related to pyRevit (and vice versa)
• add endpoints to retrieve (and visualize?) the data
• alternatively/complimentary, provide a grafana and/or Power BI dashboard example to visualize the data
• add the ability to pass the configuration via environment variables (nice to have because it's more in line with the 12-factor app, but not indispensable)
• create a (linux) container and push it to a container registry (github own ghcr.io is fine)
• provide a docker compose example with the telemetry server, mongodb or postgres and grafana in it
• update the documentation

Describe alternatives you've considered

Use OpenTelemetry, but since the goal is to simply monitor the events and scripts execution, it feels like building a tank to just kill a fly.

Additional context

MongoDB Grafana data source is a plugin for the enterprise version; so defaulting to the good old PostgreSQL would be a better option to build a fully open/free stack.

I can help with most of the things (CI, container and compose), but I'm not (yet) proficient at golang to add the endpoints (and the optional envvar parsing).
Also, since the documentation is in notion, there's no way for a contributor here to edit it.

[jmcouffin]

since the documentation is in notion, there's no way for a contributor here to edit it.

I can help with that.

[dosymep]

I can rewrite my telemetry server (simple port Go server to .net), but I need time 🫠

I use PowerBI with MongoDB and create simple report.

https://github.com/Bim4Everyone/Bim4EveryoneTelemetry

[sanzoghenzo]

sqlite database doesn't work:

Binary was compiled with 'CGO_ENABLED=0', go-sqlite3 requires cgo to work.

This flag is needed for go to call C code (such as sqlite), so we have to set it to 1.

[jaredholloway94]

I built a docker compose stack for the telemetry server, postgres, and metabase: jaredholloway94/docker-pyRevitTelemetry

Please test and submit issues!

[fishonamos]

Hi @sanzoghenzo, I’d love to take this on.

[sanzoghenzo]

Hi @sanzoghenzo, I’d love to take this on.

That's good to hear! I didn't do anything on this front, so the floor is yours 😉

@jmcouffin do I have your blessing for creating a new repository dedicated to the telemetry server?

[jmcouffin]

Be my guest @sanzoghenzo

[sanzoghenzo]

Done!

@fishonamos you can start forking and cloning https://github.com/pyrevitlabs/telemetry-server and copy over the current server from dev/pyRevitTelemetryServer.

[fishonamos]

@sanzoghenzo I am already pushing a pr. It will be great if you will copy paste this issue with the OD tags in the new repo to track it there and assign me via od.