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After starting Rails and logging in, we can use Blazer to see our user metrics. Browse to our mount point, which on my development environment is at http://localhost:3000/blazer. Querying the ahoy_visits table shows us relevant information about the user and their session. We can also save this query as a shortcut to run it again later. After browsing to the page twice, I ran the following query on the events table. It gave the following results. Note that both events come from the same visit, which is equivalent to a session. We have seen how to track events on the server-side. Now let's look at how to accomplish this from the frontend in Javascript. To do this, we need to enable the Ahoy api in the config/initializers/ahoy.rb file, as shown below. Note that Ahoy also supports geocoding so that you can see where your users are located. We will not explore that feature in this article, but it is a nice capability from a metrics perspective.
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Ahoy is used to track visits to your site and specific user events that you define. Blazer allows you to easily query and view the metrics data. In fact, blazer can be used to query any data in your database, and it has some nice built-in visualization capabilities for metrics as well.
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The Instant Poll Sample Application The application we will use for this series is an Instant Poll application. It adds a poll question that is embedded on the left-hand side panel of our entertainment news website. The code for this project can be found on GitHub.
