Firefox Downloads Visualization Powered by HBase

About:

Not only is Mozilla celebrating the release of Firefox 4, but they took the time to set up a nice visualization for downloads.

glow.mozilla.org is powered by tailing logs and streaming data into HBase:

The various load balancing clusters that host download.mozilla.org are configured to log download requests to a remote syslog server.

The remote server is running rsyslog and has a config that specifically filters those remote syslog events into a dedicated file that rolls over hourly

SQLStream is installed on that server and it is tailing those log files as they appear.

The SQLStream pipeline does the following for each request:
filtering out anything other than valid download requests

uses MaxMind GeoIP to get a geographic location from the IP address

uses a streaming group by to aggregate the number of downloads by product, location, and timestamp

every 10 seconds, sends a stream of counter increments to HBase for the timestamp row with the column qualifiers being each distinct location that had downloads in that time interval

The glow backend is a python app that pulls the data out of HBase using the Python Thrift interface and writes a file containing a JSON representation of the data every minute.

That JSON file can be cached on the front-end forever since each minute of data has a distinct filename

The glow website pulls down that data and plays back the downloads or allows you to browse the geographic totals in the arc chart view