Event and telemetry logging for statistical analysis

[yokken]

Hi all,

I did some searching around and couldn't find anything related to this. I work for a Fortune 500 doing data analytics day-to-day with an incredible tool called Splunk, which takes in logs and application data and can parse and manipulate it with statistical engines, and comes with a bunch of pretty charts and graphs to visualize the data. I'm wondering if there is any way to add the ability to log telemetry data within KSP, as well as other craft events, to a file (or set of files). Ideally this would contain things like time (down to the millisecond), the craft ID or name, type of event that is happening, and other context about the event, such as current body, lat/long, surface/orbit/target velocity, temperatures, effective engine Isp, current thrust force, etc. If this data could be recorded, it could be analyzed with a tool like Splunk to provide common flight paths, common velocities for a given altitude on a given body, average burn times, distance traveled by a given craft, time spent on EVA for a given Kerbal, number of parts exploded, and so on and so forth. I would love to track my KSP statistics, and it would be fairly easy to expand to other players if I had a way to get data from them. You could honestly turn this into a full-blown online statistics portal for KSP, but I'd love to do the analysis myself as well. KSP devs: feel free to PM me if you want help getting this going  

I realize the granularity of telemetry would have to be defined, as requesting the velocity of a craft in-game 100 times per second is probably a little too often and will likely negatively impact performance. You could start the polling at 2-5 times per second and increase it, measuring performance each time. One benefit of logging is that it really helps troubleshoot errors in the application later... I've seen it many times!

By the way, Splunk is free - Enterprise license for 30 or 60 days (can't remember) then limited to 500MB/day intake and no alerts (and other Enterprise stuff). Check it out!

I would really love to see this added to the game. Feel free to let me know your thoughts!

Edited January 27, 2016 by yokken
title change