Offload Analytics to a Secondary Service

ngrok and Traffic Policy let you integrate your "front door" gateway with an analytics service you host within your network to capture vital information about your traffic as a part of the request-response lifecycle.

With this gateway setup and the http-request action, you can:

• Host your analytics service in any network, region, or cloud.
• Leave your analytics service completely unexposed to the public internet.
• Simplify your upstream services by removing libraries and code for instrumenting them directly.
• Configure for exactly the timeout and retry conditions your services require.

1. Create endpoints for your services

First, start an internal Agent Endpoint for your upstream service, replacing $PORT based on where it listens. You can also use one of our SDKs or the Kubernetes Operator.

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Start a second ngrok agent for your analytics service.

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2. Reserve a domain

Navigate to the Domains section of the ngrok dashboard and click New + to reserve a free static domain like https://your-service.ngrok.app or a custom domain you already own.

3. Create a Cloud Endpoint

Navigate to the Endpoints section of the ngrok dashboard, then click New + and Cloud Endpoint. Now you have a Cloud Endpoint with the URL like https://your-service.ngrok.app.

4. Request customer data from your CRM and apply rate limiting with Traffic Policy

Copy and paste the policy below into your new Cloud Endpoint in the ngrok dashboard.

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What's happening here?

Traffic Policy sends all requests directly to your upstream service at https://service.internal.

As part of the response lifecycle, Traffic Policy sends an authenticated request to your analytics service with a body containing attributes, injected with CEL interpolation, about the user's request and your server's response. The http-request action is purposely given a short timeout and no retry logic to ensure this analytics request doesn't add unnecessarily slow your service's response time.

5. Try out your endpoint

• In your browser: https://your-service.ngrok.app
• In your terminal: curl https://your-service.ngrok.app

What's next?

• Read more about Traffic Policy and its core concepts.
• View your traffic in Traffic Inspector.
• Add even more logging flexibility, plus access to our entire eventing system, with the logs action.

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