No, of course a fictional company on a TV show isn't using a real service like StatHat.¹ But it sure looks like they are.

Season 3, Episode 9 Daily Active Users was all about two stats: Installs and Daily Active Users. Tracking these with StatHat would be a piece of cake.

Let's just assume "Installs" means "New User Created". In the show, they compare Installs to Daily Active Users. "Installs" doesn't make much sense for what appears to be primarily a web service.² So whenever a new user is created, they could add one line of code to track this as a counter stat:

db.Exec("INSERT INTO users (id, email, created_at, active_at) VALUES (?, ?, NOW(), NOW())", id, email)
stathat.PostEZCount("installs", "stats@piedpiper.com", 1)

Whenever a user did something on the Pied Piper platform, they could update the user row in the database:

db.Exec("UPDATE users SET active_at=NOW() WHERE id=?", id)

Then they could have a script that ran via cron every minute to send the number of active users in the past 24 hours to StatHat:

var dau int
db.QueryRow("SELECT COUNT(*) FROM users WHERE active_at > NOW() - INTERVAL 24 HOUR").Scan(&dau)
stathat.PostEZValue("daily active users", "stats@piedpiper.com", dau)

Those two calls to StatHat are all it takes to track these stats. They don't need to be created on the website first as StatHat will create new stats dynamically when it receives a new stat name.

The installs stat is a counter. Every time someone signs up for Pied Piper, it sends a count of 1 to StatHat. StatHat will then sum these up over time.

The daily active users stat is a value. Every minute, the cron script sends the current daily active users value to StatHat. StatHat will then average this value over time.

Now that the data is going to StatHat, there are many options for viewing it. The web interface allows you to inspect the data at any timeframe, compare multiple stats. It also has cards that would be an easy way to create a dashboard of Installs and Daily Active Users. Or Panic's Status Board would be another easy choice.

But there's also an embed API that allows you to embed stat data on any web page, which would be one way to get a similar looking dashboard to the one on the show. The stat integrations page gives you a small block of JavaScript you can paste in any web page. Here's a stat embedded on this blog post, styled to look somewhat similar to the Pied Piper dashboard:

The code to do this looks like:

<script src="//www.stathat.com/js/embed.js"></script>
<script>StatHatEmbed.render({kind: 'text', s1: 'K6xI3hBsBACxjF9nAd7IhOPw8RbKH5XJ'});</script>

That's all that is needed. You should see the number displayed above change every minute. Since this stat is a counter, StatHat is displaying the total count received over the timeframe.

Perfect for milestone parties:

Footnotes

1: Betteridge's law of headlines is true in this case.

2: Yes, the "platform" is available on all devices so could be installable software, but it is also clearly a web service: