Analytics for Python

Our Python library lets you record analytics data from your Python code. The requests hit our servers, and then we route your data to any analytics service you enable on your destinations page.

This library is open-source, so you can check it out on GitHub.

All of Segment’s server-side libraries are built for high-performance, so you can use them in your web server controller code. This library uses an internal queue to make identify and track calls non-blocking and fast. It also batches messages and flushes asynchronously to our servers using a separate thread.

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Getting Started

Install analytics-python using pip:

pip install analytics-python

If you’re using a system for managing dependencies, you’ll want to pin the library to 1.X to avoid breaking changes when the library is updated

Inside your app, you’ll want to set your write_key before making any analytics calls:

import analytics

analytics.write_key = 'YOUR_WRITE_KEY'

Note: If you need to send data to multiple Segment sources, you can initialize a new Client for each write_key.

Development Settings

The default initialization settings are production-ready and queue messages to be processed by a background thread.

In development you might want to enable some settings to make it easier to spot problems. Enabling analytics.debug will log debugging info to the Python logger. You can also add an on_error handler to specifically print out the response you’re seeing from our API.

def on_error(error, items):
    print("An error occurred:", error)


analytics.debug = True
analytics.on_error = on_error

Using Django? Check out the Django docs.

Identify

The identify lets you tie a user to their actions and record traits about them. It includes a unique User ID and any optional traits you know about them.

We recommend calling identify a single time when the user’s account is first created, and only identifying again later when their traits change.

Example identify call:

analytics.identify('019mr8mf4r', {
    'email': 'john@example.com',
    'name': 'John Smith',
    'friends': 30
})

The example identify call is identifying John by his unique User ID (the one you know him by in your database) and labeling him with email, name and friends traits.

The identify call has the following fields:

Find details on the identify method payload in our Spec.

Track

track lets you record the actions your users perform. Every action triggers what we call an “event”, which can also have associated properties.

You’ll want to track events that are indicators of success for your site, like Signed Up, Item Purchased or Article Bookmarked.

To get started, we recommend tracking just a few important events. You can always add more later!

Example track call:

analytics.track('f4ca124298', 'Signed Up', {
  'plan': 'Enterprise'
})

This call is telling us that your user just triggered the Signed Up event and chose your hypothetical 'Enterprise' plan.

track event properties can be anything you want to record, for example:

analytics.track('f4ca124298', 'Article Bookmarked', {
    'title': 'Snow Fall',
    'subtitle': 'The Avalance at Tunnel Creek',
    'author': 'John Branch'
})

The track method has the following fields:

Find details on best practices in event naming as well as the track method payload in our Spec.

Page

The page method lets you record page views on your website, along with optional extra information about the page being viewed.

If you’re using our client-side set up in combination with the Python library, page calls are already tracked for you by default. However, if you want to record your own page views manually and aren’t using our client-side library, read on!

Example page call:

analytics.page('user_id', 'Docs', 'Python', {
  'url': 'http://segment.com'
})

The page call has the following fields:

Find details on the page method payload in our Spec.

Screen

The screen method lets you record screen views on your mobile app, along with optional extra information about the screen being viewed.

If you’re using our mobile SDK in combination with the library, screen calls are already tracked for you by default. However, if you want to record your own screen views manually and aren’t using our SDK library, read on!

Example screen call:

analytics.screen('user_id', 'Settings', 'Brightness', {
  'from': 'Home Screen'
})

The screen call has the following fields:

Find details on the screen method payload in our Spec.

Group

group lets you associate an identified user with a group. A group could be a company, organization, account, project or team! It also lets you record custom traits about the group, like industry or number of employees.

This is useful for tools like Intercom, Preact and Totango, as it ties the user to a group of other users.

Example group call:

analytics.group('user_id', 'group_id', {
  'name': 'Initech',
  'domain': 'Accounting Software'
})

The group call has the following fields:

Find more details about group including the group method payload in our Spec.

Alias

alias is how you associate one identity with another. This is an advanced method, but it is required to manage user identities successfully in some of our destinations.

In Mixpanel it’s used to associate an anonymous user with an identified user once they sign up. For Kissmetrics if your user switches IDs, you can use ‘alias’ to rename the ‘userId’.

Example alias call:

analytics.alias(previous_id, user_id)

The alias call has the following fields:

Here’s a full example of how we might use the alias call:

# the anonymous user does actions under an anonymous ID
analytics.track('92734232-2342423423-973945', 'Anonymous Event')

# the anonymous user signs up and is aliased to their new user ID
analytics.alias('92734232-2342423423-973945', '1234')

# the user is identified
analytics.identify('1234', { plan: 'Free' })

# the identified user does actions
analytics.track('1234', 'Identified Action')

For more details about alias including the alias call payload, check out our Spec.

Historical Import

You can import historical data by adding the timestamp argument to any of your method calls. This can be helpful if you’ve just switched to Segment.

Historical imports can only be done into destinations that can accept historical timestamped data. Most analytics tools like Mixpanel, Amplitude, Kissmetrics, etc. can handle that type of data just fine. One common destination that does not accept historical data is Google Analytics since their API cannot accept historical data.

Note: If you’re tracking things that are happening right now, leave out the timestamp and our servers will timestamp the requests for you.

import datetime
from dateutil.tz import tzutc

timestamp = datetime.datetime(2538, 10, 17, 0, 0, 0, 0, tzinfo=tzutc())
analytics.track('019mr8mf4r', 'Bought a game', {
    'game': 'Duke Nukem forever'
}, timestamp=timestamp)

Timezones in Python

Python’s datetime module supports two types of date and time objects: “naive” objects without timezone information, and “aware” objects that include timezones. By default, newly created datetime objects are naive. You’ll want to make sure to use timezone aware objects when importing data to be sure the timezone information is sent correctly.

We created an aware datetime object in our example above using the tzinfo argument to the datetime constructor. Note that if we’d omitted the argument, we wouldn’t have passed along timezone info:

>>> naive = datetime.datetime(2015, 1, 5, 0, 0, 0, 0)
>>> aware = datetime.datetime(2015, 1, 5, 0, 0, 0, 0, tzinfo=tzutc())
>>> naive.isoformat()
'2015-01-05T00:00:00'
>>> aware.isoformat()
'2015-01-05T00:00:00+00:00'

If you have an ISO format timestamp string that contains timezone information, dateutil.parser is capable of creating aware datetime objects:

>>> import dateutil.parser
>>> dateutil.parser.parse('2012-10-17T18:58:57.911Z')
datetime.datetime(2012, 10, 17, 18, 58, 57, 911000, tzinfo=tzutc())
>>> dateutil.parser.parse('2016-06-06T01:46:33.939388+00:00')
datetime.datetime(2016, 6, 6, 1, 46, 33, 939388, tzinfo=tzutc())
>>> dateutil.parser.parse('2016-06-06T01:46:33.939388+07:00')
datetime.datetime(2016, 6, 6, 1, 46, 33, 939388, tzinfo=tzoffset(None, 25200))
>>> dateutil.parser.parse('2016-06-06T01:46:33.939388-07:00')
datetime.datetime(2016, 6, 6, 1, 46, 33, 939388, tzinfo=tzoffset(None, -25200))

If you find yourself with a naive object, and know what timezone it should be in, you can also use pytz to create an aware datetime object from the naive one:

>>> import datetime
>>> import pytz
>>> naive = datetime.datetime.now()
>>> aware = pytz.timezone('US/Pacific').localize(naive)
>>> naive.isoformat()
'2016-06-05T21:52:14.499635'
>>> aware.isoformat()
'2016-06-05T21:52:14.499635-07:00'

The pytz documentation contains some good additional information on timezone usage, as well as how to handle some of the more interesting edge cases.

Whatever your method, make sure you use aware datetime objects when importing your data or it will be in the wrong timezone.

# Check that a datetime object d is aware
assert d.tzinfo is not None and d.tzinfo.utcoffset(d) is not None

Server Logs Example

import dateutil.parser

import analytics
analytics.write_key = 'YOUR_WRITE_KEY'

log = [
    '2012-10-17T18:58:57.911Z 019mr8mf4r /purchased/tshirt'
]

for entry in log:
    timestamp_str, user_id, url = entry.split(' ')
    timestamp = dateutil.parser.parse(timestamp_str)  # resulting datetime.datetime object is aware

    # have a timezone? check yo'self
    assert timestamp.tzinfo is not None and timestamp.tzinfo.utcoffset(timestamp) is not None

    analytics.track(user_id, 'Shirt Bought', {
        'color': 'Blue',
        'revenue': 17.90
    }, timestamp=timestamp)

analytics.flush()

Selecting Destinations

The alias, group, identify, page and track calls can all be passed an object of integrations that lets you turn certain destinations on or off. By default all destinations are enabled.

Here’s an example track call with the integrations object shown.

analytics.track('9742', 'Song Played', integrations={
  'all': False,
  'Kissmetrics': True,
  'Google Analytics': False
})

In this case, we’re specifying that we want this identify to only go to Kissmetrics. 'all': False says that no destination should be enabled unless otherwise specified. 'Kissmetrics': True turns on Kissmetrics, etc.

Destination flags are case sensitive and match the destination’s name in the docs (i.e. “AdLearn Open Platform”, “awe.sm”, “MailChimp”, etc.).

Note:

• Available at the business level, filtering track calls can be done right from the Segment UI on your source schema page. We recommend using the UI if possible since it’s a much simpler way of managing your filters and can be updated with no code changes on your side.

• If you are on a grandfathered plan, events sent server-side that are filtered through the Segment dashboard will still count towards your API usage.

Batching

Our libraries are built to support high performance environments. That means it is safe to use analytics-python on a web server that’s serving hundreds of requests per second.

Every method you call does not result in an HTTP request, but is queued in memory instead. Messages are flushed in batch in the background, which allows for much faster operation.

By default, our library will flush:

• every 100 messages (control with upload_size)
• if 0.5 seconds has passed since the last flush (control with upload_interval)

There is a maximum of 500KB per batch request and 32KB per call.

What happens if there are just too many messages?

If the module detects that it can’t flush faster than it’s receiving messages, it’ll simply stop accepting messages. This means your program will never crash because of a backed up analytics queue. The default max_queue_size is 10000.

How do I flush right now?!

You can also flush on demand. For example, at the end of your program, you’ll want to flush to make sure there’s nothing left in the queue. Just call the flush method:

analytics.flush()

Calling this method will block the calling thread until there’s no messages left in the queue. You’ll want to use it as part of your cleanup scripts and avoid using it as part of the request lifecycle.

How do I gzip requests?

You can compress batched requests before sending them to Segment by setting the gzip argument when constructing a Client.

from analytics import Client
Client('YOUR_WRITE_KEY', gzip=True)

Detecting errors

You can listen to events to be called on failed flushes:

def on_error(error, items):
    print('Failure', error)

analytics.on_error = on_error

Logging

analytics-python uses the standard python logging module. By default, logging is enabled and set at the logging.WARNING level. If you want it to talk more, you can set a different log_level:

import logging
logging.getLogger('segment').setLevel('DEBUG')

Options

If you hate defaults or want to send data to multiple sources, then you can create your own Clients. Keep in mind that each client runs a separate background thread, so you won’t want to create these on every request. Check out these gizmos:

from analytics import Client
Client('YOUR_WRITE_KEY', debug=True, on_error=on_error, send=True,
       max_queue_size=100000, upload_interval=5, upload_size=500, gzip=True)

Django

To add analytics to your Django web server, you need to include the initialization code in the ready() method of a custom AppConfig object for one of the apps in your project. This method is responsible for performing initialization tasks for your project.

myapp/apps.py file:

from django.apps import AppConfig
import analytics

class MyAppConfig(AppConfig):

    def ready(self):
        analytics.write_key = 'YOUR_WRITE_KEY'

myapp/__init__.py file:

default_app_config = 'myapp.apps.MyAppConfig'

Will this work in production / uWSGI / gUnicorn?

Yes!

How do I add logging to Django?

If you’re troubleshooting your analytics, you’ll want to turn on logging.

You need to add the analytics logger and handler to your settings.py.

LOGGING = {
    'version': 1,
    'formatters': {
        'simple': {
            'format': '%(levelname)s %(message)s'
        }
    },
    'handlers': {
        'console': {
                'level': 'DEBUG',
                'class': 'logging.StreamHandler',
                'formatter': 'simple'
        }
    },
    'loggers': {
        'segment': {
            'handlers': ['console'],
            'level': 'DEBUG',
            'propagate': True,
        }
    }
}

and turn on module logging in your initialization call in urls.py.

import logging
import analytics

analytics.debug = True # turn on debug logging
analytics.write_key = 'YOUR_WRITE_KEY'

Google App Engine

We have heard from our customers that Google App Engine does not resolve project dependencies, so you’ll need to get requests and python-dateutil and add it into your project so that analytics-python can find it.

If you’re having issues with threads outliving your request, check Background threads and synchronous mode

Troubleshooting

Request Size Limits

Keep in mind that we have a size limit of 32KB per request and 500KB per batch request!

If you’re having trouble we have a few tips that help common problems.

No events in my debugger

1. Double check that you’ve followed all the steps in the Quickstart.

2. Make sure that you’re calling one of our API methods once the library is successfully installed—identify, track, etc.

No events in my end tools

1. Double check your credentials for that destination.

2. Make sure that the destination you are troubleshooting can accept server-side API calls. Compatibility is shown on the destination docs pages and on the sheets on your Segment source Destinations page.

3. Check out the destination’s documentation to see if there are other requirements for using the method and destination you’re trying to get working.

Overriding Context Value

In some cases, you will want to manually pass in ip or userAgent values. Since we do not automatically send these in, you will manually pass these through the context object like so:

analytics.track('9742', 'Song Played', context={
  'ip': 1234,
  'userAgent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 4.1.1; en-gb; Build/KLP) AppleWebKit/534.30 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Safari/534.30'
})

Be sure to see the full reference of supported keys.

Versioning

Check that you have the most recent version.

python -c "import analytics; print analytics.VERSION"

Does it match the most current version?

If not, update your version.

pip install -U analytics-python

or

easy_install --upgrade analytics-python

Background threads and synchronous mode

Experimental feature, available since 1.3.0b1.

In some cases, you will want to disable threads and send each request synchronously. To do so, you can use the sync_mode option:

import analytics

analytics.write_key = 'YOUR_WRITE_KEY'
analytics.sync_mode = True