[R&D] Should Cairn be deprecated in favor of openedx/tutor-contrib-aspects

[DawoudSheraz]

Cairn comes in with tutor main plugin index and offers an out of the box real-time analytics solution utilizing:

• Vector to collect tracking logs on server
• Clickhouse to store tracking events and provides live and materialized views to interact with data
• Superset to view the data

While cairn is being maintained and a new version is released with every Open edX release, for past 2 releases (Redwood & Sumac), many features on Open edX, like reporting on Instructor dashboard, require https://github.com/openedx/tutor-contrib-aspects. aspects is also an analytics system inspired from cairn but has many other things in it. That leaves a question: Should Edly keep on maintaining cairn considering aspects is needed for certain features? The aim of this spike is to:

• Compare aspects with cairn
• List out where both systems are similar
• List what features of aspects are not available in cairn and vice versa
• If there are features/views in cairn that can be useful in aspects, how much effort is needed to port them?

Apart from above, any additional information that compares aspects and cairn will be useful. With all the information & research, determine if we need to keep maintaining cairn or can it be deprecated in favor of aspects?