Our biggest and best release yet
With Countly 16.12, we introduce performance, user experience and extensibility enhancements that place Countly at the forefront of the analytics market as the de-facto open source analytics standard for mobile and web applications.
After 3.5 years of its foundation, Countly continues its steady progression toward the top of the mobile and web analytics market, making it 3rd largest push notifications platform deployed according to SafeDK and 7th largest Android analytics platform according to Mobbo. Countly servers have been collecting more than 80 billion data points each month, and more than 12,000 applications have been using Countly SDK actively.
With this success in mind, we have been working harder than ever and are proud to provide you with our latest release. Below, you can read about the most important enhancements in 16.12, or directly go to download page.
A fresh, new user interface and experience
We have revamped our user interface and user experience so it looks even more modern, leaner and faster. We know you loved our previous UI, so decided that this new UI would consist of enhancement to the existing UI so you can be immediately productive and don’t spend time trying to understand new changes. Moreover, with new design guidelines, searching among users, applications, funnels and events is quicker and easier.
Take a look at the new User Profiles page for example … it’s much easier on the eyes than the old one. We love the new design and hope you do too!
We also refactored our user interface to improve load times and performance. There is now less CSS and HTML used and we use far fewer icons (all of which slowed down load times), so you should find the dashboards faster and more responsive.
Other design related updates include:
- The whole crash analytics user interface has been greatly simplified to provide greater ease of use and error codes are no longer colored to make the easier to read.
- Platforms plugin shows all platforms using a tree structure rather than pie charts.
- If there is no data for a graph, then Countly simply shows a warning on each chart.
- The App details page now shows who created the application, date of creation, last edited and app users information.
- Plugins page (Management > Plugins) now has a design which allows easy navigation, enabling and disabling a particular plugin.
More enterprise grade security features
We wanted to make sure that Countly continues to be the standard by which open source mobile and web analytics solution are measured, so one area we have continued to greatly enhanced is security and privacy. We now have an extensive login security plugin to make sure brute force login attempts are identified and eliminated. There are also improvements to password security, as system administrators can now specify how strong passwords must be and define whether captcha confirmation is asked on login or not. Additionally, password aging can be imposed in order to make sure that passwords change after a predefined amount of time.
System logs have evolved from simply showing who has logged in, logged out, added or removed an app towards being a a more robust audit center where more than 30 system related events are captured and recorded.
There are also several additional dashboard HTTP response headers and API response headers (e.g X-XSS-Protection, X-Frame-Options and X-Content-Type-Options) for a more secure server side implementation.
Features you’ll fall in love with
Let’s start with push notifications, since you’ll notice some really big changes there. Upon starting to send a push notification, you’ll see a new wizard-type user interface which guides you seamlessly through your task from beginning to end.
Some of the most significant enhancements (there are too many to list here) to push notifications include:
- The about to preview how a push message will look on Android and iOS, before sending to masses.
- Ability to send a push notification to a group of users based on their local timezone (instead of all at once).
- Geolocation definition is greatly improved, using OpenStreetMap and Leaflet JS (Enterprise Edition).
There are also 5 new plugins you’ll love:
- Compare plugin: All custom events and application data can be easily compared in a time series chart.
- Star rating plugin: In order to collect and analyze how your end users are rating about your application, we developed a simple plugin. It will show a popup asking the user to provide a star rating when called on SDK side, and you’ll be able to view and analyze this information on the dashboard.
- Slipping away users plugin: This plugin shows a list of users who haven’t been seen for a specific amount of time, e.g 7, 14 or 30 days.
- Desktop application plugin: With this plugin, it’s possible to add a desktop application type and get analytics data. Currently we support MacOS (native) and Windows (native C#) based applications and will add Linux (C++ and Python SDKs) in the future.
- Server stats plugin: This plugin shows how many data points (e.g sessions, custom events, page views, crashes and push data) a Countly server collects over the last 3 months.
Moreover, instead of mobile device and model names (e.g SM-G930F), we now use marketing names of corresponding models (e.g Galaxy S7) under Devices and Drill, using Google’s Android device mapping list.
This release has also been localized into the more languages than any prior release, including support for Japanese, Vietnamese, Chinese, Russian, Turkish, Hungarian, German, Greek, Korean, Latvian and Estonian.
Performance improvements for highly scalable servers
When we designed Countly, we always had “scalability” in mind. Over time we have seen several Countly installations exceeding billions of datapoints collected every month. As we know that this is only the beginning in a mobile-era and further scalability will be critical we have come up with more performance improvements.
MongoDB has a document size limitation of 16mb per document, which is tied to BSON object size limitation. Even if you have not reached this limit, , when document becomes large and you write to it with some frequency, writes become much slower.
In Countly 16.12, we use data splitting technique on all metrics collections, as well as events and users collections. This brings in more performance for high volume and high traffic sharded systems.
Even More Changes
Countly prides itself on bringing cutting-edge technologies to users of open source software around the world, and this release continues that tradition. No matter what you do, Countly has the right components for real-time analytics and extensibility choices using plugins.
A complete changelog detailing each new change, including API changes to build Countly plugins, is available here.
Make Countly better with us
If you want to take an active hand in helping Countly maintaining its leading position in open source mobile & web analytics software, there are many ways you can contribute to the platform. Visit the Contributing to Countly page to learn about some of the different ways in which you can participate.
While this is a general release, you may encounter bugs or missing features. To report issues encountered, you can:
If you need help upgrading to Countly Enterprise Edition 16.12, let us know so we can arrange a guided demo. We’ll be rolling updates for our current customers starting January 15th, 2017.
You can download Community Edition 16.12 directly from Github page, read installation or upgrade instructions, and download SDKs to give Countly a try.
Just another step in Countly journey
Countly has embarked on a great journey — redefining what an analytics platform should be for business people and developers. This innovation hasn’t happened overnight, and Countly 16.12 is the latest and greatest release yet on the road to the next generation of analytics.
There are a lot more features for everyone in this release and we can’t wait for you to deploy Countly in your production environments right now.
Stay tuned with us for more exciting features!
— Görkem Çetin, Product guy @ Countly
