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

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


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 04 2015, @06:19PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 04 2015, @06:19PM (#218008)

    Why is it that you absolutely never reach for the answer of creating it yourself?

    I'm astounded at how crippled everyone thinks they are.

    First understand that all analytics is, is an X,Y on a chart. So at your server side take a look at what google is storing for X,Y and set your system up to store that number.

    This would be a server side operation, I recommend nodeJs for this as it offers easy subtle control timers etc etc.

    Then you make an interface, you more or less only make 1 because they only do graph charts anyways. You could toss in pie charts, but again add an extra day for that.

    How long does it takes you? About 3 days.

    Should this be the end of the world such that your absolutely incapable of just handling this problem like a man by yourself? No.

  • (Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 04 2015, @06:45PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 04 2015, @06:45PM (#218026)

    Yo, douche nozzle, I bet you're used to "handling it yourself" if you know what I mean.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 04 2015, @06:49PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 04 2015, @06:49PM (#218029)

    I just did this.

    I needed a system that would do an HTTP/HTTPS "health check" on a bunch of webservers. Scoured the web etc -- nagios et al were too much for my needs. I looked at some of the free cloud monitoring services and found them to be lacking, unreliable, or inane.

    I wrote a ten-line python script that basically did it myself. It checks to see that I get a 200 back from a list of webservers, and emails/texts me with problems.

    Never did find a good F/LOSS solution.

  • (Score: 2) by GungnirSniper on Tuesday August 04 2015, @07:58PM

    by GungnirSniper (1671) on Tuesday August 04 2015, @07:58PM (#218071) Journal

    No one ever got fired for using GA.

    Chances are even if the typically-overworked IT denizens could create something similar from scratch, it will be different from the tools that management already knows and is comfortable with.

    • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 04 2015, @08:44PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 04 2015, @08:44PM (#218101)

      No one ever got fired for using GA.

      Well, they should. This privacy-invading nonsense that involves third parties like Google, Facebook, etc. should be heavily discouraged. But most web 'developers' are utterly and completely incompetent.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 04 2015, @09:42PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 04 2015, @09:42PM (#218155)

    I recommend nodeJs for this...

    NodeJs? Fanboy alert. KISS approach: Create a tiny borderless IFRAME on your web pages that sends URL parameters to a PHP (or other LAMP) script on another server. Make sure it's a different server so that write bottlenecks don't take down your site. Your script would take these URL parameters and append them to a flat log file, along with IP address and any other HTTP parameters you want to store. You may want to have the script split the log-file into one-day-per-file, using a formatted version of the system date as part of the destination file name.

    The URL parameters are whatever you want to track, such as page number, section of web site, etc. (depending on CMS or site conventions.)

    Then you can process these log files any way you want to get stats. An experienced MS-Access coder should be able to generate typical reports if you don't want to do that part yourself.

    There a few things Google may be able to do that you can't readily get this way, such as translating HTTP browser type string into "friendly" titles, at least not without building or finding your own translation list. Google can also guess location based on IP address, using their huge internal look-up tables. There may be OSS equivalent lists out there.

    Because IP addresses are not unique, you may want to consider using session cookies to track visit duration etc., but some users get ticked off by that.