SaaS Analytics Platform
A usage analytics and reporting platform built for Northstar Analytics' product-led SaaS customers.
Customer: Northstar Analytics (demo)
Northstar Analytics needed a multi-tenant analytics product that could ingest usage events from customers' applications and present meaningful reporting without requiring their customers' engineering teams to do heavy integration work.
Challenge
Northstar's early product required customers to instrument extensive custom event tracking before getting any value, which slowed adoption. They needed an architecture that could ingest usage data with minimal integration effort while still supporting flexible, tenant-specific reporting.
Solution
We designed a multi-tenant ingestion and reporting platform with a lightweight SDK that captures common usage patterns automatically, reducing the custom instrumentation required to get started. Tenant data is logically isolated at the database level, with a reporting layer that supports both pre-built dashboards and flexible custom queries for teams that want to go deeper.
Architecture
A high-throughput ingestion API accepts usage events and writes them to a time-series-optimized PostgreSQL schema, partitioned by tenant. A background aggregation pipeline pre-computes common rollups (daily/weekly active usage, feature adoption) to keep dashboard queries fast, while a query layer allows ad hoc filtering directly against raw event data for advanced use cases. The frontend is a Next.js application with server-rendered dashboards for fast initial loads.
Key features
Lightweight SDK
Captures common usage patterns automatically, reducing custom instrumentation.
Multi-tenant data isolation
Logical isolation per tenant at the database level.
Pre-computed rollups
Common metrics are aggregated ahead of time for fast dashboard loads.
Ad hoc query support
Teams that need deeper analysis can query raw event data directly.
Integrations
Customer applications
Lightweight SDK embedded in customers' own products.
Billing system
Usage-based plan tiers tied to actual ingestion volume.
Representative outcomes
Faster time to first insight
Customers see meaningful dashboards with minimal upfront integration work.
Consistent dashboard performance
Pre-computed rollups keep reporting fast as usage volume grows.
Supports both casual and power users
Pre-built dashboards and ad hoc queries serve different customer needs.
Technologies
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