Send Segment events inline rather than in background jobs

Segment’s documentation recommends not sending events from Sidekiq or other batch job systems

The analytics-ruby gem makes requests asynchronously, which can sometimes be suboptimal and difficult to debug if you’re pairing it with a queuing system like Sidekiq/delayed job/sucker punch/resqueue. If you prefer to use a gem that makes requests synchronously, you can use simple_segment , an API-compatible drop-in replacement for the standard gem that does its work synchronously inline. If you choose to use simple_segment, please note that because the simple_segment package isn’t owned and maintained directly by Segment, Segment won’t be able to provide support for it.

Their API client is configured by default to collect events in batches of 100 in a background queue.

In addition:

• We enqueue roughly 3 million tracking related jobs a month - a significant load on Redis
• This generates roughly 6 million log entries a month - which costs us in Datadog

Bad 🔗

class TrackingWorker
  include Sidekiq::Job

  def perform(attributes)
    Analytics.track("Some event", attributes)
  end
end

class SomeController < ApplicationController
  def create
    # ... some work here ...
    TrackingWorker.perform_async
  end
end

Good 🔗

class SomeController < ApplicationController
  def create
    # ... some work here ...
    Analytics.track("Some event", attributes)
  end
end