Analytics and Canadarm

[garrypolley]

@mhemesath and I have had ideas about how to gather analytics using Canadarm. Since we have the beaconHandler it would work pretty nicely for sending that information.

The thought I have right now to handle this is to create a second library that "shims" to the Canadarm object a Canadarm.analytics that works similarly to how the logging works now. It'll have a lot of defaults that it will put out, but you can pass in your own custom attributes as well. Here are some ideas of how it could work:

// The normal case
Canadarm.analytics()

// Adding custom data
Canadarm.analytics(
  {
    user_id: '123-8238fj', 
    date_of_birth: '2014-05-10'
  }
);

// How setup could work:
Canadarm.analytics.session_id = 'blah'

I think implementation would be done via a custom handler that was only triggered via the Canadarm.analytics call. We would plan to use all the same Appenders so that you get the error and analytic information all the time. If desired it could also be decoupled, I'm not 100% sure yet.