It's an interesting idea, but you must understand the limitations of GA. After around 250k events it will start sampling your data. From personal experience, this is very limiting. There's also a not-insignificant delay between the data being sent to GA and extracting it out. From what I could tell, it's also non-deterministic, so you might get some events processed and to show, but others will not show for a while.
To give some context: I created an A/B test framework that (can also) use GA as a backend[0]. However, given this limitation I changed direction and created a backend using AWS Lambda and Redis[1], and also later explored using AWS Lambda with Google BigQuery[2] as a backend.
For small / medium scale, I would still stick to something like Graphite though. You can fit quite a bit of event traffic even on a low-end VPS these days. If you need to scale up, then either a hosted solution like the ones you mentioned, or building something on top of BigQuery (or keen.io) seems like a better approach than relying on GA.
This is more an experiment for dealing with smaller sites since I don't really have a lot of events to track at the moment. But I agree that the solution you proposed is a better idea.
Even for smaller sites I think you'd be better off setting a $5 VPS and run graphite or something similar. The delay in getting results from GA alone is a good enough reason not to rely on Analytics for metrics.
Even a very small system can easily generate enough events that it becomes a problem.
Had a look at opszero and couldn't work out why I should submit Gimel there. What would my project gain from being there?
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 19.8 ms ] threadTo give some context: I created an A/B test framework that (can also) use GA as a backend[0]. However, given this limitation I changed direction and created a backend using AWS Lambda and Redis[1], and also later explored using AWS Lambda with Google BigQuery[2] as a backend.
For small / medium scale, I would still stick to something like Graphite though. You can fit quite a bit of event traffic even on a low-end VPS these days. If you need to scale up, then either a hosted solution like the ones you mentioned, or building something on top of BigQuery (or keen.io) seems like a better approach than relying on GA.
[0] https://github.com/Alephbet/alephbet
[1] https://github.com/Alephbet/gimel
[2] http://blog.gingerlime.com/2016/a-scalable-analytics-backend...
Would you be interested in submitting your Lambda app to opsZero? https://www.opszero.com
Even a very small system can easily generate enough events that it becomes a problem.
Had a look at opszero and couldn't work out why I should submit Gimel there. What would my project gain from being there?