In Maple, Tutor became the only supported install path for Open edX, correct?
And Tutor’s incompatible with both Figures and edX Insights, right?
And Tutor’s new analytics environment, Cairn, is not free, right?
So did Maple remove analytics capability from the community?
I’m not involved in any of those projects so I may not be completely in the loop but I’ll try to answer.
From what I understand:
Figures - per its README it has not yet implemented support for Koa, nor Maple. So the problem is not Tutor (in fact it used to work with Tutor), but that Figures development has tended to focus on older releases. It could also be that Appsembler focuses more on tools like Metabase than Figures these days per this comment. Anyhow, there’s no reason in principle why Figures can’t add support for Maple and resume Tutor compatibility in the future.
edX Insights - in my opinion it was never a useful solution for small or even medium size installations of edX. It requires an expensive AWS EMR cluster and is slow and fragile, with fairly limited reports - because it was designed to process huge amounts of activity data at edX scale, which isn’t what most other Open edX users are dealing with. And even at a larger scale, I’d say most of our larger clients preferred to integrate their own analytics solution rather than use Insights.
Cairn - is open source but not free. I haven’t tried it but it looks like a nice approach. I’m not sure how much it costs to run in practice but I would bet it ends up costing less than Insights running on EMR, even with the added software license cost. If someone wants to share their experiences it’d be nice to hear.
So as you can see the situation didn’t really change from Koa to Maple.
In terms of other options and future directions I would point you to what I wrote here and to @natea’s reply: Is Insights / analytics-pipeline going to be replaced? - #5 by braden
I’m Omar from the Appsembler team. My colleague John Baldwin created and maintains Figures. I’ll answer the questions I know.
And Tutor’s incompatible with both Figures and edX Insights, right?
Figures has the Tutor Figures plugin, but it’s the latest supported version is Juniper.
The root cause is that Figures Open edX release upgrade is lagging behind, the good news is that it’s being worked on. Please follow the progress here: #figures Open edX Slack channel.