Game Installation Monitoring & Alert System

Overview

This project is part of a final project in a Cloud & Big Data Engineer course at @Naya College. The project is a Python-based monitoring system designed to track the installation trends of mobile games. The system uses real-time data from the Google Play Store to monitor installations and identify significant spikes in game popularity. Alerts are triggered if installation growth exceeds a defined threshold, allowing for timely analysis and decision-making.

The project consists of three core components:

• Game Data Collection: Fetches daily installation counts for selected games from the Google Play Store.
• Trend Analysis: Monitors installation growth over time, calculating percentage increases.
• Alert System: Triggers alerts if a game's installation count shows a significant increase, allowing further analysis.

Usage

Prerequisites

• Python 3
• MySQL

Installation

1. Clone the repository:

   git clone https://github.com/Nivshiz/Games_Monitoring

2. Install the required Python packages:

   pip install -r requirements.txt

3. Use create_game_monitoring_db.sql to set up the game_monitoring_db MySQL database, which create the games and installations tables necessary for monitoring game data.
4. Create a .env file containing your MySQL credentials:

   DB_HOST = your_host
   DB_USER = your_user
   DB_PASSWORD = your_password

5. Add your games to the games table: (app_id can be found in the google play url's game page. Just search the game in the google play store)

   INSERT INTO games (name, app_id) VALUES ('Coin Master', 'com.moonactive.coinmaster');

6. Run the script to start monitoring (Daily manually):

   python monitor_installations.py

Configurations (optional):

• Customize Average Period:: The script fetches installation counts for all games stored in the games table, calculates the average installs over the last 7 days, and triggers an alert if the increase exceeds the threshold. You can change the number of days calculated in the average.
• Customize Threshold: You can change the threshold_percentage in the script to adjust the sensitivity of the alerts.

Future Work

• Extract AppStore Data: Extract and combine installations count from both google play store and apple store.
• Integrate Reddit Data: Fetch posts and comments from Reddit for data mining about the game.
• Integrate OpenAI: Use GPT to analyze Reddit's data for a deeper understanding of the spikes in the installations count.
• Cloud Deployment: Migrate to a cloud-based DB and schedule daily runs using a scheduler service.
• Visualizations and Analysis: Use BI tools to create graphs and dashboards for analysts to visualize game trends.
• Genericize: Make the system more generic so that the user only needs to select their game, and the system will automatically identify and monitor its competitors.