Computing Podcast Stats with Elasticsearch

July 10, 2015 by Eric Richardson

Eric Richardson / KPCC

Since rejoining KPCC last fall, I've spent a good bit of time on the topics of metrics and analytics. There's a very healthy ecosystem of options for monitoring the traffic to your website or the health of your servers, but as a radio station we end up with a lot of questions around how our audio is getting consumed that don't always fit in those same tools.

Podcasts are the hot topic in the audio world right now, but they present a big challenge for those of us trying to make sense out of the numbers. Some of that challenge is intractable right now—podcast clients simply don't give us any information about when a downloaded file is played—but some of it is just about putting a better wrapper around old-school download stats.

At KPCC we're using two free tools—Logstash and Elasticsearch—to make it much quicker and easier to keep track of podcast downloads. — Continue Reading...