Building a SaaS product, a system to handle sensor data from an internet-connected thermostat or car, or an e-commerce store often requires handling a large stream of product usage data, or events. Managing event streams lets you view, in near real-time, how users are interacting with your SaaS app or the products on your e-commerce store; this is interesting because it lets you spot anomalies and get immediate data-driven feedback on new features. While this type of stream visualization is useful to a point, pushing events into a data warehouse lets you ask deeper questions using SQL.
In this post, we’ll show you how to build a system using Apache Kafka on Heroku to manage and visualize...