Clickstreamer: Clickstream Analytic powered by Apache Flink
Introduction
Understanding user behavior is crucial for optimizing website performance and enhancing the user experience. One way to do that is by building a clickstream analytics system. But, what is Clickstream? Well, clickstream is a sequence of hyperlinks one or more website visitors follows on a given site, presented in the order viewed. Clickstream analysis is useful for web activity analysis, software testing, market research, and many other usecases.
This article demonstrates how to build a real-time clickstream analytics platform using Apache Flink for stream processing and ClickHouse for fast querying and analysis.
Tools:
- DataGen: Generates sample clickstream data for testing.
- Apache Kafka: Collects and streams clickstream data from DataGen.
- Apache Flink: Processes and transforms data from Kafka topics before sending it to ClickHouse.
- ClickHouse: Stores and queries the processed data efficiently.
- Grafana: Visualizes data through interactive dashboards.
Architecture
Implementation
Data Ingestion
Generate sample clisktream with datagen Configure Flink to consume data from Kafka topics.
Data Transformation
Implement Flink jobs to enrich and transform clickstream data. Perform real-time aggregations to derive metrics like page views, user sessions, and more.
Data Visualization
Build dashboard with Grafana.
Demo
Check out the demo in the YouTube video to see the platform in action.
