Setting up Snowplow - winlinvip/snowplow GitHub Wiki
Setting up Snowplow is a five step process:
- Setup a Snowplow Collector
- Setup a Snowplow Tracker and/or Setup a Third-Party Webhook
- Setup Enrich
- Setting up alternative data stores (e.g. Redshift, PostgreSQL)
- Analyze your data!
The Snowplow collector receives data from Snowplow trackers and logs that data to S3 for storage and further processing. Setting up a collector is the first step in the Snowplow setup process.
Setup a Snowplow collector now!
Setup your collector? Then proceed to step 2: setup a tracker.
## Step 2: Setup a Snowplow Tracker
Snowplow trackers generate event data and send that data to Snowplow collectors to be captured. The most popular Snowplow tracker to-date is the JavaScript Tracker, which is integrated in websites (either directly or via a tag management solution) the same way that any web analytics tracker (e.g. Google Analytics or Omniture tags) is integrated.
Snowplow allows you to collect events via the [webhooks] webhooks-defn of supported third-party software.
Webhooks allow this third-party software to send their own internal event streams to Snowplow collectors to be captured. Webhooks are sometimes referred to as "streaming APIs" or "HTTP response APIs".
Note: once you have setup a collector and tracker or webhook, you can pause and perform the remainder of the setup steps later. That is because your data is being successfully generated and logged. When you eventually proceed to step 3: Setup Enrich, you will be able to process all the data you have logged since setup.
Setup your tracker(s) and/or webhook(s)? Now proceed to step 3: Setup Enrich.
## Step 3: Setup Enrich
The Snowplow enrichment process processes raw events from a collector and
- Cleans up the data into a format that is easier to parse / analyse
- Enriches the data (e.g. infers the location of the visitor from his / her IP address and infers the search engine keywords from the query string)
- Stores the cleaned, enriched data
Once you have setup Enrich, the process for taking the raw data generated by the collector, cleaning and enriching it will be automated.
Setup Enrich? Proceed to step 4: setup the StorageLoader.
## Step 4: Setup the alternative data stores (e.g. Redshift, PostgreSQL)
Most Snowplow users store their web event data in at least two places: S3 for processing in Hadoop (e.g. to enable machine learning via Mahout) and a database (e.g. Redshift or PostgreSQL) for more traditional OLAP analysis.
The StorageLoader is an application to regularly transfer data from S3 into other databases e.g. Redshift. If you only wish to process your data using Hadoop on EMR, you do not need to setup the StorageLoader. However, if you would find it convenient to have your data in another data store (e.g. Redshift) then you can set this up at this stage.
Setup alternative data stores.
Setup the alternative data stores? Then proceed to step 5: analyse your data.
## Step 5: Analyse your data!
Once your data is stored in S3 and Redshift, setup is complete and you are in a position to start analysing it. As part of the setup guide we run through the steps necessary to perform some intiial analysis and plugin a couple of analytics tools, to get you started.
Get started analysing Snowplow data
![architecture] conceptual-architecture
You now have all five Snowplow subsystems working!