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
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 04 2015, @06:29PM
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
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
It's not necessarily just the data but also the aggregation and visualization.