Real-time Analytics with Counters and SSE

Track page views, count events, and stream live activity — all with InfiniteOcean's built-in primitives. This is how the InfiniteOcean admin dashboard works.

Running Drops. This tutorial uses Drops, a compact language that replaces curl commands. Run them via POST /exec or paste into the live editor.

1 The Building Blocks

InfiniteOcean has two primitives that make analytics trivial:

Atomic counters — Increment fields on entities without read-modify-write races. Just POST a drop with {"+views": 1} and the counter increments atomically.
SSE streams — Connect to /live/* and receive drops in real-time as they're written. No polling, no WebSocket setup.

Together: counters for aggregation, SSE for live feed.

2 Counting Page Views

Every time someone visits a page, increment a counter with the incr command:

drops

incr analytics/daily @2026-02-10 .page_views
incr analytics/daily @2026-02-10 .requests

The + prefix means "increment this field by the given amount." If the entity doesn't exist yet, it starts at 0. This is atomic — 1000 concurrent requests won't lose a count.

3 Reading the Counts

drops

read analytics/daily @2026-02-10

Returns: {"page_views": 4521, "requests": 12034, ...}

The counter values are merged into the entity read automatically.

4 Per-Endpoint Tracking

Use dynamic field names to track different endpoints:

drops

-- Track a POST /drop request
incr analytics/endpoints @2026-02-10 ."POST /drop"

-- Track a GET /entity request
incr analytics/endpoints @2026-02-10 ."GET /entity/*"

Read back the entity and you get a full breakdown: {"POST /drop": 4567, "GET /entity/*": 2341, "POST /sql": 891}

5 Querying with SQL

Query across multiple days with SQL:

drops

sql `SELECT key AS date, page_views, requests FROM "analytics/daily" ORDER BY key DESC LIMIT 7`

Returns the last 7 days of analytics. SQL works on entities the same way it works on any table.

6 Live Activity Feed with SSE

Write event drops for live tracking:

drops

-- Write an event drop (no key = events accumulate, never overwritten)
write analytics/events { method: "POST", path: "/drop", status: 200 }

Connect to the SSE stream to receive events in real-time:

HTTP only. SSE (Server-Sent Events) connections use a persistent HTTP stream — there's no Drops equivalent. Use EventSource in JavaScript or curl -N to connect.

bash

curl -N https://api.infiniteocean.io/live/analytics/events \
  -H "X-Ocean-Key: YOUR_KEY"

data: {"method":"POST","path":"/drop","status":200,...}
data: {"method":"GET","path":"/entity/users/123","status":200,...}

In the browser:

javascript

const events = new EventSource('/live/analytics/events?_key=YOUR_KEY');
events.onmessage = (e) => {
  const event = JSON.parse(e.data);
  addToLiveFeed(event); // render in your UI
};

7 Putting It Together

A minimal dashboard in about 15 lines of JavaScript:

javascript

// Fetch daily stats
const res = await fetch('/entity/analytics/daily/2026-02-10', {
  headers: { 'X-Ocean-Key': key }
});
const stats = await res.json();
document.getElementById('views').textContent = stats.payload.page_views;

// Live feed
const sse = new EventSource(`/live/analytics/events?_key=${key}`);
sse.onmessage = (e) => {
  const ev = JSON.parse(e.data);
  // prepend to activity list
};

That's it. No database to set up, no aggregation pipeline, no WebSocket server. Counters accumulate, SSE streams, and SQL queries across it all.

8 How the Admin Dashboard Works

The InfiniteOcean admin dashboard at /admin uses exactly this pattern internally. Every HTTP request increments counters on _admin/daily, _admin/hourly, _admin/endpoints, and _admin/status entities. The live feed publishes event drops via the bus. The dashboard reads counter values and connects to SSE — all built on the same API primitives available to every user.