View Your Cloud Usage in Commandeer in your own local Data Lake
It is easy to view your data on Commandeer. We save almost none of it on our servers. That is correct, we do store your name, email, and if you SSO in, then your Open ID Connect. Under the hood we are using AppSync to save this, and then having you login via Google, Microsoft, or GitHub via Auth0. If you allow us to, we also store anonymous page views and button clicks, but you can opt out of this during on-boarding or under settings.
Everything else the system caches is yours, and is stored directly in your data folder on your computer. To view it follow this 2 step process.
1. Press the Help Menu
On the top right of the app, click the help icon to open up information about the system.
About half way down you will see a link to your data folder file.
Clicking this brings up your finder window. You can see that there are a bunch of history folders, and your accounts, which I will explain more about in a minute. Of this data we only store what is in the users/user.json file and the users/settings.json. If you choose to allow us to store your system usage we also save that anonymously for analysis on what tools to build out next or to focus more time on. You can turn this on or off during onboarding and then from your settings menu.
View Your Usage Analytics
On the Usage Analytics page, you can view your usage information. This shows the pages you view the most, and the actions you do. It will also soon have searches performed, and account switching stats of changing regions, changing between local and the your different accounts. (If you haven’t read about the different account types in Commandeer, this article is helpful) This data is tallied from your own analytics data lake. Every page and button event triggers a save to this folder, and then you can view them here.
This data is stored in the analytics-history data lake.
Below you can see the json of the page and button views.
Conclusion
Your privacy is paramount to us. We feel strongly that our on-prem solution to the cloud is meant for you to be able to view your system in a meaningful way, and that data collection should be limited to helping the system become better.
As the system continues to grow, and we roll out teams, we want to be able to track usage in a meaningful way across teams, but we want it to be for you and on your system. So for instance, we are investigating ways to have our logs and usage analytics be able to stream to either your own CloudWatch Logs or to S3. We would love to hear suggestions if you have any. You can drop us a line at our github issues page or directly on our website via Intercom Chat,
Commandeer is a tool built by developers for developers that solves three things in the cloud. First, we are focused on the deployment of your IAC. Secondly, we enable you to ‘Test your Plumbing’. Lastly, Commandeer provides you the ability to easily view your data. (Manage AWS, Algolia, Slack, Twilio, SendGrid, Serverless, LocalStack, Ansible, Docker and more from your desktop)
