MixPanel tracking API down

http://status.mixpanel.com/

by mef • 14 years ago

48 38 14 years ago

status.mixpanel.com

mrchess• 14 years ago

This is unfortunate. I was about to implement MixPanel on my startups site (it already laced in our development code), but their API being down completely locks our application ... actually shipping MixPanel in production not looking so hot right now.

EDIT: As others have voiced my issue was that it was taking up to 30 seconds for requests to timeout disrupting various things in my JS code (it is a Backbone app) -- it didn't actually "lock" it. I was using the JS API.

taf2• 14 years ago

shouldn't the API calls you make to a tracking service be done in such away that they would not effect your application whether they're available or not available? Analytics is nice, but not having it shouldn't cause your whole app to lock up right? Kind of similar to say a caching infrastructure - if memcached goes down your app just slows down, but doesn't crash right?

blazingfrog2• 14 years ago

Their documentation is either wrong or misleading:

Basic Javascript integration

We load the library onto the page asynchronously, which keeps your website loading quickly even if placed in the <head> of the page.

In our case just commenting out the library load solved all our issues.

emmett• 14 years ago

Speaking as someone who uses a ton of mixpanel in production (http://www.twitch.tv/) the way you handle this is to make all your calls asynchronous.

I am bummed that we are going to have missing data though :-(

latchkey6• 14 years ago

This works fine for code where you are just firing a /track 'ping' back to the server on a page load. But, if you are trying to do things like track login's where you send a http redirect right after /track, then you need to use the optional callback parameter to /track and do the redirect in the callback.

The problem with this is that if their JS doesn't load at all (which is the problem right now), then /track is never called and thus the callback is never fired.

So because you can't depend on MP to reliably serve up a simple .js file, you have to write your own wrapper around all of that code to do a timeout incase the callback never fires. What a mess.

patio112• 14 years ago

As somebody who consumes a few of these things, and got a pager about it prior to it being on HN, this is something that a) will inevitably happen and b) should not block the application. Think very, very carefully before you ever block the request/response cycle on an external API. (I'd say "Never do it" but I think I could come up with conceivable apps and APIs where that makes sense if I was fully awake.) Since analytics callbacks don't generate immediate customer value and can fail totally without discomfitting anyone, you should never block a request for them.

Instead, you deal with them asynchronously. There's a few ways to do it mechanically. I offload them to my job queue and set the priority to "lowest possible." When the job queue is otherwise empty, a worker process (that no actual human is waiting on) slurps up a few of the events and fires them off.

Only downside, which I never bothered fixing: I have an "OMG the queue is stuffed to overflowing... the queue worker must be non-responsive!" monitoring test which, since that symptom has featured in most of my customer-visible downtime, generates a red alert. (i.e. Immediate SMS followed by phone call escalation, as opposed to an "FYI check this" email.) Any downtime at Mixpanel or KissMetrics lasting longer than a few minutes reliably triggers this alert.

On the plus side, this means that when I tell you "Mixpanel really doesn't fail at 2 AM Japan time all that often" you should trust that I'd have noticed.

iheartmemcache• 14 years ago

I (and I'm sure other HNers) would love it if you couldgo into a little bit more detail as to how your job queue is constructed.

lucisferre• 14 years ago

As others have pointed out, no SaaS provider will guarantee 100% uptime. You are blaming a very poor design on your part on a 3rd party service. Ironically one should be far more concerned about using your startup for anything than using MixPanel.

latchkey6• 14 years ago

There is no sane reason why Mixpanel can't give 100% uptime for a single .js file. https://api.mixpanel.com/site_media/js/api/mixpanel.2.js is down right now and that is the biggest part of the issue.

suhail• 14 years ago

Hi everyone,

We believe we have figured out the problem and have already gone ahead with a solution. The issue, at this time, appears to be that the traffic we normally get to our API has increased substantially. Whether it's legitimate or not is unknown but we're unfortunately at the mercy of waiting for DNS to update. It's also possible we may see bottlenecks further down our infrastructure path but we're actively thinking through what's next - fortunately, we have more control there.

We'll have a full transparent write up once things are back to normal.

If you're using our JavaScript libraries, your website should not be greatly affected by our downtime other than the data that will be lost. We're deeply sorry and disappointed ourselves.

Our support team is happy to talk to you at status.mixpanel.com to give you updates as they get them.

Suhail

rsbrown• 14 years ago

Suhail, with regard to impact on installed sites I agree that lost event data is not the end of the world. However, it's currently taking 20-30 seconds for requests (inserting the mixpanel js) to timeout. During the outage, it would be much less painful if the requests were failing more immediately.

I just sent this same message to support (at) mixpanel.com.

EDIT: just to reiterate -- the major problem isn't the API being down. It's the extreme timeouts being experienced trying to load a static JS file.

stevenou• 14 years ago

I completely agree. I woke up to some crazy long page rendering time on NewRelic and couldn't figure out what was going on... until I saw the huge backlog of mixpanel events on my db. Not only is it making page rendering slow, even worse, it's tying up my background workers for 30 seconds at a time, causing a huge backlog on ALL my background tasks.

rhizome• 14 years ago

Which might also be a factor in the apparent request load if stale requests are ballooning the numbers, if not consuming resources that cause the apparent problem to appear larger. A bunch of elephants standing around blocking things is quite a different problem than a bunch of pigs running down the road.

latchkey6• 14 years ago

I do use the JS api's and it was affecting my website. I was seeing a high number of JS errors and even worse, my users were seeing odd behavior because I was depending on your /track callbacks to fire and they weren't.

This is the second time you guys have had a major outage in recent memory and your status page looks like a christmas tree. I really do love mixpanel, but unfortunately I'm going to relegate your service in my mind to 'untrustworthy third party service' every time I write code against your api.

Also the fact that I found a pretty major bug in your loader code which prevents it from working correctly with IE browsers (https://mixpanel.com/docs/integration-libraries/javascript) last week and today you are still distributing the broken code has me worried. Do you not take this stuff seriously?

raylu• 14 years ago

Could you elaborate on the loader code bug?

alexatkeplar• 14 years ago

Just an idea - but when your event collectors start to become unresponsive, why not redirect your load balancer to a SnowPlow-style "no moving parts" collector, e.g. CloudFront + S3? You would have to merge the S3 log data into your main data store after the outage was over, but at least there would be no data loss (at least, not for events logged by GETs - POSTs are not supported by CloudFront), and webpages wouldn't be hanging.

The SnowPlow architecture diagram is here: https://github.com/snowplow/snowplow/wiki/Technical-architec...

newhouseb2• 14 years ago

In case you're not doing this already, it's generally a good idea to set a low TTL like 60 seconds on your DNS so that you can make huge configuration changes relatively quickly.

datahack• 14 years ago

Nice response, and glad to see a good one. We know how it goes, but I agree with timeout length being an issue for us as well. It would almost be better if we were 'errored out' so our app performance wouldn't lag.

Might I suggest something like Chaos Monkey? Real-time APIs are highly vulnerable to DDOS and other traffic conditions because they'll so readily accept new connections, might be something worth throwing on the crew regular-like. :)

dorkusprime• 14 years ago

"If you're using our JavaScript libraries, your website should not be greatly affected by our downtime other than the data that will be lost."

I wish that was true. But since the library doesn't handle service downtime at all gracefully, we're stuck with the callbacks not firing -- something we depended on.

reinhardt• 14 years ago

Looking forward to the postmortem.

jhuckestein3• 14 years ago

This is why I queue all my mixpanel requests on the server. I'll just re-run them once it's back up.

le_isms4• 14 years ago

This is a great idea! Do you mind letting us know what your setup's like?

wulczer2• 14 years ago

We just issue Celery jobs to track events in Mixpanel, so if their API is failing, the jobs fail and get retried later on.

If we get too many messages accumulated in the queue where these jobs go, we just purge it (better lose that data than let RabbitMQ die because of memory exhaustion). Although there have to be a whole damn lot of events there for us to actually notice

jhuckestein3• 14 years ago

I mentioned it in an answer to a different post in this thread. The short answer is I use Redis via Resque.

newhouseb2• 14 years ago

The iOS SDK also desperately needs some sort of queuing as well (fortunately it's open source so someone else (like me) can eventually build it in).

MixPanel tracking API down

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