We'd like to gather data on important operations occurring within our e-commerce infrastructure. In order to do so, we need to identify an appropriate set of analytics events to collect, as well as the locations at which these events should be emitted.
Analytics Overview
We emit several different kinds of events from a variety of places in our system. BI events are emitted from the e-commerce front end to track users' progress through and interaction with the payment and verification UI. Tracking log events are emitted by edx-platform when the enrollment API performs enrollment actions. We're now going to want to collect data on products and orders from Oscar.
Oscar's Analytics App
Oscar ships with an Analytics app used to gather data on products and users. It does this by leveraging Django's signal dispatcher, listening for signals from other apps and using these signals as cues to create and update models which aggregate data on product views, user searches, basket additions, and the placing of orders. The Analytics app also includes a reporting module capable of generating CSV and HTML reports on product performance (e.g., views, basket additions, purchases, by product) and user behavior (e.g., product views, basket additions, orders, total spent, date of last order, by user).
If necessary, we can extend Oscar's Analytics app by extending existing receivers or adding new signals and receivers. For example, if we want to send an event to Google Analytics whenever a new order is placed, we could extend the existing order_placed receiver to do this, or create a new receiver which listens to the same signal and communicates with Google Analytics.
A Note About Enrollments
Orders for enrollments are fulfilled by the enrollment API, not Oscar. As such, it's not appropriate to emit events related specifically to enrollment from within Oscar. These kinds of events (e.g., edx.course.enrollment.enrollment.activated, edx.course.enrollment.enrollment.deactivated, edx.course.enrollment.enrollment.mode_changed, edx.course.enrollment.upgrade.succeeded) are emitted from within edx-platform.