Pipelines

Aspects provide two Pipelines which are detailed below.

Vector Pipeline

As of Aspects version 5.0, the Vector pipeline is the default pipeline (previous versions defaulted to a Celery / Ralph pipeline). It works by capturing the standard output from the LMS logs and sending them directly to configured “sinks” or data destinations. It implements two similar pipelines: one for xAPI data (enabled by default) and one for tracking logs (disabled by default).

Vector is lighter weight, and generally data will arrive faster. It can also write a copy of every xAPI statement to an S3 compatible bucket as a backup, which can later be restored to ClickHouse (see Restore xAPI data from the Vector S3 backup).

To learn more about Vector, see the Vector documentation.

To configure Vector as your pipeline, see the Quick Start - Vector guide.

Ralph Pipeline

Prior to version 5.0, the Ralph pipeline was the default. It is now an alternative pipeline, and remains the most robust. It will retry the most important failed events, and will catch most duplicates before they hit the database. This pipeline consist of a plugin in the LMS (event-routing-backends) that will send through HTTP the events to the Ralph API.

Ralph will validate the events and send them to the configured backends. Clickhouse is the only Ralph backend supported by the Aspects plugin.

Ralph is for sharing xAPI data using the LRS standard.

To learn more about Ralph, see the Ralph documentation.

To configure Ralph as your pipeline, see the Quick Start - Ralph guide.