Apache Flagon UserALE

Apache UserALE is part of the Apache Flagon Project. It is a client side instrumentation library written in JavaScript designed for easy deployment and lightweight configuration in gathering logs from your web applications for user behavioral analytics.

Once included in your project, Apache UserALE provides a comprehensive behavioral logging capability, capturing every event on every element rendered in your DOM.

Additional documentation and a demonstration can be found at the Apache Flagon website.

Quickstart Guide

1. Include UserALE in your project as either a module or script tag
2. Set up a logging end-point. Try our example server utility or try out our Elasticsearch (ELK) stack example.
3. Configure UserALE settings using our API, including where to POST logs to (port:8000 for UserALE example or port:8100 of ELK/Logstash)
4. Further explore the UserALE API to customize your log feed, add filters, custom logs, and modify logs themselves. Explore a few examples here and a wider set in our example utility.
5. Visualize and analyze your logs. See our sample kibana dahsboards for behavioral analytics.

Table of Contents

What's New Installation Configure Usage Examples Indexing, Storing, and Visualizing Logs Modifying Source Contributing License

What's New in Version 2.4.0?

• Refactors Map and Filter APIs as generalized callbacks for functionality
• Adds additional UserALE API examples utilizing generalized callbacks
• Minor updates to update deprecated downstream dev dependencies
• Minor changes to documentation, updated examples

See our CHANGELOG for a complete list of changes.

Installation

Either through cloning our source repo or by using npm:

npm install flagon-userale

or

npm install flagon-userale --engine-strict (enforces supported Node.js versions)

To include UserALE as an object in your project, include as a module:

import * as userale from 'flagon-userale';

or

const userale = require('flagon-userale');

Our webpack example illustrates this use-case.

You can also include UserALE as a script-tag. A pre-built version of the userale script is included in our package and repositories:

<script src="https://github.com/apache/flagon-useralejs/raw/master/node_modules/flagon-userale/build/userale-2.4.0.min.js"></script>

Our script tag example illustrates this use-case

If you include UserALE as a script-tag, consider installing via npm as a development dependency:

npm install --save-dev flagon-userale

Or if you want to use a CDN, then you can use something like

<script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/flagon-userale@2.1.1/build/userale-2.4.0.min.js"></script>

We also support a WebExtension that can be added to your browser in developer mode. Follow the link for instructions.

Once UserALE is installed in your project, your application will start generating logs automatically.

Configure

Some configuration is necessary. At minimum you will need to provide UserALE an end-point to ship logs to; default behavior is to ship logs to localhost:8000.

NOTE: In order to facilitate testing configuration and usage of UserALE, we have included an example logging server in our example directory. This is a very helpful utility that works with both included module examples and script-tag examples. We strongly recommend experimenting with it.

Configuration details follow:

If you have included UserALE in your project as a module, you will need to use our userale.options() function, which exposes library configuration options through our API.

For example, if you do not want UserALE to start logging automatically, you can modify this behavior through the userale.options() API (autostart config).

Then, you can use the userale.start() API export to begin logging at the appropriate time during page load or triggered from an event:

const changeMe = "me";
userale.options({
    "userId": changeMe,
    "autostart": false,
    "url": "http://localhost:8000/",
    "version": "next",
    "logDetails": false,
    "sessionId": "this one"
});

userale.start();

Additional examples of userale.options() can be found in our example directory.

The complete list of configurable parameters that can be configured via userale.options() is:

If you have included UserALE as a script-tag in your project, you can use HTML data parameters to pass configuration options to the library through the script tag. For example:

  <script
          src="https://github.com/apache/flagon-useralejs/raw/master/node_modules/flagon-userale/build/userale-2.4.0.min.js"
          data-url="http://localhost:8000/"
          data-user="example-user"
          data-version="2.4.0"
          data-tool="Apache UserALE Example"
  ></script>

You have access to the same parameters listed above, however, naming conventions vary slightly for use in HTML:

If you are using our WebExtension, you can modify some of these parameters via the extensions' options page.

Usage

Including UserALE in your project as a module attaches the UserALE script as an object to the page.

We have exposed a number of functions that assist you in modifying, filtering, and customizing logs

A complete list of available functions are as follows:

Including UserALE as a script-tag provides you access to the same functions listed above. However, UserALE essentially becomes a property of the DOM. As such, you'll need to call functions as a window property:

userale.options = window.userale.options

Examples

We provide a number of examples to illustrate how the functions above can be used with sample webpages and logging servers. These are tailored for module examples and script-tag examples. Select examples are below:

Filter your logs with userale.filter:

userale.filter(function (log) {
    var type_array = ['mouseup', 'mouseover', 'mousedown', 'keydown', 'dblclick', 'blur', 'focus', 'input', 'wheel'];
    var logType_array = ['interval'];
    return !type_array.includes(log.type) && !logType_array.includes(log.logType);
});

Modify (add/remove) log fields with surgical precision using userale.map:

userale.map(function (log) {
        var targetsForLabels = ["button#test_button"];
        if (targetsForLabels.includes(log.target)) {
            return Object.assign({}, log, { CustomLabel: "Click me!" });
        } else {
            return log;
        }
      });

(Additional examples illustrate precision custom labeling, using a variety of functions.)

Generate custom logs with userale.log:

document.addEventListener('change', function(e) {
    if (e.target.value === 'log') {
        userale.log({
            target: userale.getSelector(e.target),
            path: userale.buildPath(e),
            type: e.type,
            logType: 'custom',
            userAction: false,
            details: 'I can make this log look like anything I want',
            customField1: 'foo',
            customField2: 'bar',
            userId: userale.options().userId,
            toolVersion: userale.options().version,
            toolName: userale.options().toolName,
            useraleVersion: userale.options().useraleVersion,
            sessionId: userale.options().sessionId,
            customLabel: "(custom) Log Example"
        });
    }
});

User our own log packaging pipeline to streamline custom HTML event logging with userale.packageLog:

document.addEventListener('change', function(e){
    if (e.target.value === 'packageLog') {
        /**You can then use the 'Mapping' API function to modify custom logs created with the packageLog function*/
        userale.map(function (log) {
            var targetsForLabels = ['change'];
            if (targetsForLabels.includes(log.type)) {
                return Object.assign({}, log, { logType: 'custom', customLabel: 'packageLog Example' });
            } else {
                return log;
            }
        });
        /**You can also use the details function to package additional log meta data, or add custom details*/
        userale.packageLog(e, userale.details(userale.options(),'change'));
    } else {
        return false
    }
});

Again, see Usage for differences in invoking these functions with module and script-tag includes.

You can find additional examples on our website.

Indexing, Storing and Visualizing Logs

We recommend Elastic products, specifically an ELK cluster, for indexing and storing logs in productions.

You can find a 'sand-box' ELK build, configuration files, and visualization/dashboards tailored for UserALE in the Apache Flagon parent repository.

We also provide some documentation about stack-considerations on our project website.

Modifying Source

You may wish to modify UserALE to suite your needs. After making modification to UserALE src, you will need to rebuild the UserALE script (and run tests).

To (re)build UserALE:

npm run build

To run UserALE unit tests:

npm run test

We use gulp-mocha for unit tests. The results will print to your terminal:

...
    attachHandlers
    ✓ attaches all the event handlers without duplicates
    ✓ debounces bufferedEvents (505ms)
    defineDetails
      - configures high detail events correctly
...

  45 passing (954ms)
  1 pending

Any failing tests will also be logged in the terminal. If there are failing tests, please consider submitting an issue report.

For more guidance on modifying Flagon UserALE src code, check out the guide on our website.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Simply submit an issue. Pull requests are welcome. The core team will review it and work with you to incorporate it into UserALE. If you want to become a contributor to the project, see our contribution guide.

Join the conversation: tell us your needs, wishes, and interests by joining our mailing list!

License

Apache Flagon UserALE is provided under Apache License version 2.0. See LICENSE and NOTICE files at MASTER for more details.