Using Sidekiq for asynchronous Mixpanel tracking in Rails

We've started to add server side Mixpanel tracking, and official documentation recommends tracking asynchronously so it doesn't effect performance. The Mixpanel method involves writing events to a log file, and then consuming them later. I came up with a more streamlined method where you use Sidekiq to perform the tracking asynchronously with no need for a file.

This first step isn't absolutely required, but I created a singleton instance for my Mixpanel tracker so I don't have to create a new instance every time:

class MixpanelTracker  
  include Singleton

  def initialize
    @tracker = Mixpanel::Tracker.new(ENV['mixpanel_token'])
  end

  def track(user_id, event_key, properties)
    @tracker.track(user_id, event_key, properties)
  end

end

Then I created the Sidekiq worker:

class MixpanelWorker  
  include Sidekiq::Worker

  def perform(user_id, event_key, properties)
    tracker = MixpanelTracker.instance
    tracker.track(user_id, event_key, properties)
  end
end

And in my controller code, I call perform_async on the worker:

    MixpanelWorker.perform_async(user.id, 'Created an account', {
        'Name': user.name,
        'Email': user.email
    })

That's it! For some reason the tracking didn't work in my local development environment, but it worked fine once I pushed it to Heroku

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