Product Analytics/Superset Access

Hello, dear reader! If you're on this page you're probably interested in checking out Superset.

Apache Superset (available at superset.wikimedia.org) is a dashboarding and data exploration tool. The screenshots on the right showcase two examples of it – reading and editing metrics dashboards created by Connie Chen – and illustrate some core features like formatted text (which can include links), menus for user input, and interactive charts. There are a lot of ways to slice and dice the data and many chart options in Superset (see gallery of options on the right) to visualize that data with.

Turnilo (available at turnilo.wikimedia.org) is data exploration tool and can be thought of as a much lighter version of Superset. All the datasets available in one are also available in the other because both of these tools hook up into the same backend database called Apache Druid, where these datasets are stored as "data cubes" (aka "Druid Datasources" in Superset). Unlike Superset, Turnilo does not let you create dashboards and its charting capabilities are very limited. If you're familiar with the concept of pivoting when working with spreadsheets, Turnilo is basically just for doing that.

Access
If you've tried to open either of those links (or any Superset/Turnilo links in the past), you've seen something like this:"https://superset.wikimedia.org is requesting your username and password. The site says: “Developer account (use shell login name not wiki) - allowed groups: wmf, nda”"

It's understandable (and completely okay, even!) if you're not sure what exactly it's asking you or how to get past that.

Let's demystify it a bit.

A developer account is the account you use on Wikitech. It's also known as "LDAP account/credentials" within the Wikimedia tech world and you can create one here. The Wikitech account password and the UNIX shell username you pick will be the login info you will use to access Superset/Turnilo.

Why?
Great question! There are two reasons:


 * 1) The data in Druid/Superset/Turnilo has not been cleared for public release. In very few cases there are public versions of datasets – and those have been altered for public consumption for security/privacy reasons like the geoeditors dataset which has a private version and a public version – and in other cases the data may never become publicly available.
 * 2) LDAP info is how account access, group membership, and permissions are programmatically managed by the ops engineers on the SRE and Analytics Engineering teams. They have a whole system set up for managing key-based authentication, permissions, and access to things like SWAP for running queries and performing analyses, the data lake (which includes events from EventLogging and traffic data that has IP addresses), and BI tools like Superset – which ties into the general system that they use to manage all of Wikimedia's infrastructure.

Besides being able to use Superset and Turnilo, having Wikitech/LDAP enables you to contribute to Wikimedia projects (including MediaWiki Core and MediaWiki extensions) on Gerrit (similar to GitHub) and use Wikimedia Cloud Services like Cloud VPS (similar to Amazon EC2) and Toolforge for things like making your own Wikipedia & Commons bots.

Requesting access
Once you have a developer (Wikitech) account, you will need to request to be added to either the  or the   group. The  group is for full-time req# staff and the   group is for external collaborators and contractors who have signed an NDA. The request is made by creating a Phabricator task tagged with  where you will need to:


 * Specify who you are and your Wikitech username (preferably linked to your User page on Wikitech)
 * Specify which group you're requesting to be added to
 * For  group: mention that you're a full-time WMF employee.
 * For  group: you will need your supervisor to confirm by commenting on the task.
 * Include the reason for your request – e.g. "to access Superset/Turnilo"

Here are some examples of requests to use as reference: Danny Horn's and Kate Zimmerman's.

It might take a few days for this request to be processed but once it's done, it's done. Congratulations, you're one of the cool kids now!

Aside: if this is your first time hearing about it, Phabricator is the tool used for project management, software bug reporting and feature requests at Wikimedia. Refer to these instructions for creating a Phabricator account by logging in with your Wikimedia unified account or the Wikitech developer account. Whichever one you don't pick can be linked to your Phabricator account later to enable you to login with either.

Troubleshooting: once your request is processed and you see a confirmation that you've been added to one of those groups, try logging in with your shell username (check this page if you don't remember what you picked) and Wikitech password. If for some reason your access is denied, you will need to contact the Analytics Engineering team for support.

Training
If you're interested in learning more about Superset/Turnilo and what you can do with them, you can book an appointment with anyone on the Product Analytics team to have a certified data professional give you a tour of Turnilo, dashboarding in Superset, and explain the various datasets available within those tools. Training can be done 1:1 or in groups. See our Office Hours page for more details.

P.S. We're hoping to make offline/asynchronous training available in the near future.