Analytics/Systems/Superset

Superset is an Apache incubator project, originally started at AirBnB. It enables visualizations and dashboards built from various analytics data sources. WMF's Superset instance can be found at https://superset.wikimedia.org. Like Turnilo, it provides access to various Druid tables.

Access

To access Superset, you need wmf or nda LDAP access. For more details, see Analytics/Data access#LDAP access.

If you have that access, you can log in at superset.wikimedia.org with your developer shell username and password.

Usage notes

• The "Druid Datasources" list shows ingested tables that are available for querying. As of October 2018, this includes e.g. daily and hourly pageviews data (the daily version is only updates once a month, but goes further back), a sampled excerpt of webrequest data, unique devices, and a few select EventLogging schemas. If a recently created Druid datasource is not yet visible in the list, try clicking "Scan New Datasouces".

• NULL values don't show up properly in the values selection dropdown list for filters (i.e. one can't use that dropdown to exclude NULL values from a chart or limit it to NULL values). But one can use the regex option instead: Type in ".+" (without the quotes), and accept the offer to create that as an option.
• By default, always use predefined SUM metrics when available. When choosing a metric then picking the SUM aggregation function, the aggregation is managed by superset and uses the floatSum operator. This operator uses 32 bits floats instead of 64 bits longs or double, leading to inaccuracies. Usually predefined SUM(...) metrics are available and should be used, as they are manually defined using doubleSum or longSum 64 bits operators.

...

Administration

Upgrading

To upgrade, first follow the instructions in the analytics/superset/deploy README to update the deploy repository. Once deployed, activate the superset virtualenv, add /etc/superset to PYTHONPATH (to allow superset to pick up configuration) and follow the Superset upgrade instructions (minus the pip install superset --upgrade part). This should be something like:

. /srv/deployment/analytics/superset/venv/bin/activate
export PYTHONPATH=/etc/superset
superset db upgrade
superset init

Deploy

This assumes that one has already filed the change for the superset deploy repository. The first thing to do is test the change on the staging instance, an-tool1005.eqiad.wmnet:

# ssh to deploy1001 and set the working directory
ssh deploy1001.eqiad.wmnet
cd /srv/deployment/analytics/superset/deploy

# create a new branch from the master one, name it as you prefer
git checkout -B testing_something_important

# cherry pick the change in the new branch created
git cherry-pick $change-from-gerrit

# deploy only to an-tool1005, without logging in the ops's sal
scap deploy --no-log-message -f -l an-tool1005.eqiad.wmnet "Test deployment for something important"

Then check if Superset works as expected:

# Create a ssh tunnel and then test it via localhost:8080 on the browser
ssh -L 8080:an-tool1005.eqiad.wmnet:80 an-tool1005.eqiad.wmnet

If you are happy with the Superset version, then merge and deploy to the production host:

# ssh to deploy1001 and set the working directory
ssh deploy1001.eqiad.wmnet
cd /srv/deployment/analytics/superset/deploy

scap deploy -l analytics-tool1004.eqiad.wmnet "Deployment for something important"

How to

See status

systemctl status superset.service

Bounce

systemctl restart superset

See also

• https://github.com/wikimedia/incubator-superset Wikimedia fork of Superset