Implementing Asynchronous Telemetry in Elixir

Christian Alexander illustrates the use of the Telemetry library in Elixir, which allows applications to emit and subscribe to events in a manner similar to Node.js event emitters. Common uses for Telemetry include metrics publication and request logging in Elixir applications. However, since telemetry event handling is synchronous, it can lead to performance bottlenecks. To address this, Christian presents an approach to capture product analytics asynchronously. This involves creating a GenServer process that collects events and periodically sends them in batches to an analytics tool like PostHog. By leveraging Ets tables for efficient in-memory storage and the GenServer's built-in periodic timeout message, the process effectively decouples the event collection from the main application flow, thus eliminating the latency introduced by direct analytics transmission.