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Ask Soylent: FOSS Equivalent to "Google Analytics"

posted by janrinok on Tuesday August 04 2015, @05:16PM   Printer-friendly
from the tell-it-like-it-is dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Hello Soylentils. I work in the IT Department of a mid sized utility company. Our engineering department requested that we use Google Analytics to track how people are hitting certain pages, from where, and whether or not they are getting to pages from links on our website or directly. A co worker found that Google Analytics can get expensive. Does anyone have any experience with any FOSS alternatives such as the ones listed in the article below?

http://opensource.com/business/14/10/top-3-open-source-alternatives-google-analytics

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2, Informative) by opinionated_science on Tuesday August 04 2015, @05:42PM

    by opinionated_science (4031) on Tuesday August 04 2015, @05:42PM (#217994)

    Isn't this just apache logs and grep?

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  • (Score: 3, Funny) by tibman on Tuesday August 04 2015, @05:51PM

    by tibman (134) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday August 04 2015, @05:51PM (#217998)

    Only if you like reports with zero aggregation : ) Which sounds like an oxymoron.

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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by Lunix Nutcase on Tuesday August 04 2015, @06:22PM

    by Lunix Nutcase (3913) on Tuesday August 04 2015, @06:22PM (#218012)

    No, it's not. Not even close. Have you ever used Google Analytics even once?

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 04 2015, @06:29PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 04 2015, @06:29PM (#218015)

      What data do they collect that you wouldn't find in Apache logs?

      • (Score: 3, Interesting) by pendorbound on Tuesday August 04 2015, @07:11PM

        by pendorbound (2688) on Tuesday August 04 2015, @07:11PM (#218040) Homepage

        In terms of what they *collect*, lots of fingerprinted info about the browser. Versions, plugins, screen resolution, etc. More than just the user agent string in a combined log contains because GA executes JavaScript code on the client to do additional detection.

        Beyond the collection though, the reporting they provide is substantially above what you'd be likely to cook up with a shell pipeline. Even if you completely eschewed graphs (their graphs are very useful) and said tables of data were good enough, you'd be hard pressed to present the data in as many useful forms as GA does.

        Came here mostly to say piwik though. I've been using it for a couple of years, and it's a pretty good approximation of what GA gives you, without you giving Google anything more than they already get by way of your users' search results & DNS queries.

      • (Score: 2) by Lunix Nutcase on Tuesday August 04 2015, @08:10PM

        by Lunix Nutcase (3913) on Tuesday August 04 2015, @08:10PM (#218075)

        It's not necessarily just the data but also the aggregation and visualization.

    • (Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Tuesday August 04 2015, @07:45PM

      by opinionated_science (4031) on Tuesday August 04 2015, @07:45PM (#218064)

      Nope. Why I asked...

      • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Wednesday August 05 2015, @09:01AM

        by TheRaven (270) on Wednesday August 05 2015, @09:01AM (#218408) Journal
        They run some client-side JavaScript to log things like how long you spend on each page and fingerprint individual users so that you can tell how they navigate between pages. This is really useful for usability studies on your web site: Are people visiting the front page and leaving? Where are they actually trying to go? Are they spending a long time on a particular page that they only find after a lot of searching?
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    • (Score: 2) by DarkMorph on Tuesday August 04 2015, @09:34PM

      by DarkMorph (674) on Tuesday August 04 2015, @09:34PM (#218149)
      Well I certainly haven't. Google Analytics is one of the few things that all of my 3 layers of browser JS protection filters prevent from running by default.

      • (Score: 2) by Yog-Yogguth on Friday August 07 2015, @12:56AM

        by Yog-Yogguth (1862) Subscriber Badge on Friday August 07 2015, @12:56AM (#219349) Journal

        Same here, I don't allow it anywhere and don't think anybody should. By default I block everything.

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