[DEPR]: Generalize / remove Insights references

[bmtcril]

Proposal Date

2024-08-20

Target Ticket Acceptance Date

2024-09-30

Earliest Open edX Named Release Without This Functionality

There is no expected functionality loss in named release repositories for this ticket. Any changed tools repos would presumably take effect immediately.

Rationale

The Insights repositories have been deprecated, this work is to perform the "generalization" work outlined in the parent ticket #221 . This includes renaming any generally useful Insights settings, removing or making documentation links configurable, and refactoring any code in the openedx ecosystem so that if can be used by other analytics tools as well as legacy Insights operators. These changes are intended to be non-breaking, but might require changing things like setting names, or adding new settings to keep feature parity.

Note: The proposal date is pushed back after the creation date to give us time to gather the items we're targeting.

Deprecation

The proposed changes for this round are focused on code changes across the openedx Github org. There are several places where Insights is referenced that are in varying stages of deprecation of their own (ecommerce, edx-documentation, etc) and we propose leaving those as-is until those repos are removed. The work for this round is:

• Refactor the edx-platform use of the ANALYTICS_DASHBOARD_URL & ENABLE_CCX_ANALYTICS_DASHBOARD_URL to be less Insights specific (stop concatenating URLs in code, make CCX_ANALYTICS_DASHBOARD_URL a separate setting and remove ENABLE_CCX_ANALYTICS_DASHBOARD_URL)
• Remove ANALYTICS_API_KEY and ANALYTICS_API_URL from default settings files
• Remove references to Insights from repo-tools maintainer_reports
• Remove references to Insights from edx-tools/repo-stats (this repo has since been archived!)

Open questions:

• edx-django-release-util/scripts/update_repos_version.py - is this still in use by 2U or can it go away?
• Paragon has numerous references to Insights, is 2U still maintaining a Paragon based front-end for Insights or can these references be removed? is has been determined that these are unrelated to Insights as a product? See comments below.

Migration

TBD

Task List

• Answer open questions
• Create tickets in the appropriate repos for necessary changes and link here

[bmtcril]

@zacharis278 @MichaelRoytman I'm working on this proposal for the next stage of Insights deprecation, but would like to get your early feedback and help answering the open questions before I announce it. I've set the proposal date to 8/16, do you think you could take a look and help point me in the right directions by then?

[zacharis278]

The references to insights in Paragon are unrelated to this insights so no need to change anything there. I don't know anything about that update_repo_version job but as far as I can tell we don't use it. I'll poke around a bit just to be sure.

[bmtcril]

Hey @zacharis278 were you able to find out any more on the update_repo_version job? Are you good with putting this out for comment this Friday 8/16?

[bmtcril]

Per the forums post, this is now accepted and can be worked on at any time: https://discuss.openedx.org/t/depr-generalizing-or-removing-remaining-insights-references/13709