Igniters, There has been lots of talk of proposals about various usage metrics for Ignite and nothing came of it. I would like to resurrect the topic and propose something very simple and non-intrusive.
1. Update Checker The main purpose of the update checker is not to collect metrics, but to notify users about a new version of Ignite by accessing maven.org and getting the version out of the metadata file: http://repo2.maven.org/maven2/org/apache/ignite/ignite-core/maven-metadata.xml This way we do not send any information anywhere and, at the same time, urge our users to download and start using the latest version of Ignite. 2. Startup Counter This piece is optional, but we can also get an insight in how many times a certain Ignite release gets started. This is just a cool metric for the community to gauge the project popularity. You can think of it as of a page visit counter shown on many websites. We can even decide to display this counter on the Ignite website as well. To do this, we can simply add a JAR in maven for every release, e.g. ignite-start-counter.jar, which will contain only 1 byte. Every time an Ignite node starts, it will download this JAR in the background. Then we will be able to view the number of the total downloads for this JAR in Maven Central, which is essentially the number of starts of Ignite nodes. *Note that neither of the above suggestions require Ignite to send or track any user information whatsoever.* Please reply suggesting weather you are OK with this approach. D.
