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Ask HN: User telemetry which isn't Google Analytics?

4 points by UnoriginalGuy ↗ HN
So I, like many, have always been an avid user of Google Analytics on my sites. However I never realised that was seemingly my ONLY option until now...

We have a project which will be primarily aimed at children. And while management would love your typical Google Analytics experience, they cannot authorise the collection of data by an external company (both for PR/political reasons, but also the lawyers are nervous even with a privacy policy about lawsuits and other state's data collection laws (it might rarely apply)).

I've been googling around I'm really not coming up with much. All everyone talks about is Google Analytics or even Microsoft's Azure version of the same (Application Insights, which is still externally grabbed).

So what are my options here? .Net would be ideal but failing that anything with a Web-API interface will be workable. It just has to be in-house, and not cost a huge sum (because the politics of spending more than the department budget is a headache).

8 comments

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leesalminen
I've used Piwik (piwik.org) before with success. It's fairly extensible as well.
UnoriginalGuy
That looks pretty interesting. We'd need to install MySQL for that in particular, but honestly we could just single-box the Piwik and basic infrastructure it requires (PHP, Apache, MySQL).

Thanks for the suggestion definitely something I'll be looking into further.

mooreds
I will second piwik. I've used it on my own sites. The only issues I've found:

   * not quite as mature as GA (to be expected)
   * little support from vendors.  For example, I wanted to use piwik for my leanpub books, but that wasn't possible.
If you don't want to set up a mysql box, etc, there is a piwik hosted option, which costs money (looks like $65/month for 300k hits, as of this writing: https://piwik.pro/cloud#pricing ).

Side note, I wonder if piwik pro pricing is a good proxy for the minimum amount of value/month that GA provides google?

MalcolmDiggs
I think this a great option. I've also heard good things about AWStats (awstats.org), but I think that might be intended more for the backend (log files and such).
zhte415
Another vote for Piwik, which I find great in many cases including one in particular: when you're in situations where Google services are blocked (such as China, or visitors from a similar firewall, perhaps corporate).

Any website that uses Google Analytics has no clue how many China visitors they have (or visitors where Google Analytics is firewalled), unless they adopt their own metrics program.

Plus, you hold the data, and you govern how the data is used (or, not used). That is a huge bonus too for many folks.

gesman
I run small hosting company and want to offer analytics services to my clients, that will include all details that Google analytics hides as well as allows us to host all the data locally, without using any third party service. Here's project description with image snapshot:

http://www.mensk.com/traffic-ray-new-splunk-app-to-visualize...

It's multi-platform, open source, fully operational with a free Splunk license. Currently support only apache logs, but wouldn't be that difficult to add IIS support