Why I finally won't go for open-source analytics tool (for now)

You discovered Google Analytics a few years ago (a webmaster tool to see how many visits on your websites), and used it efficiently. But, you know, Google-centralized internet, etc. and then you thought "Let's go self-hosted and open-source!". And then you tried Piwik and Open Web Analytics.

I did the same. After a few months, here are my conclusions.

Open Web Analytics has a great look, close to Google Analytics, but every week, I had to deal with new issues:

• first I discovered that a gigantic table was growing in the MySQL database:

  | owa                | owa_request                   |       4.44 |
  | owa                | owa_click                     |       5.30 |
  | owa                | owa_domstream                 |     238.28 |
  +--------------------+-------------------------------+------------+ 

Nearly 250 MB analytics data in 2 weeks (for only a few small websites), this means more than 6 GB of analytics data per year in the MySQL database! ... or even 60 GB per year if you have 100k+ pageviews. That's far too much for my server. This was (nearly) solved by disabling Domstream feature. (Ok Domstream is a great feature, but I would have liked to know in advance that this would eat so much in the database).

• then, once this was solved, a few weeks later I saw this big table coming again (then I had to reset the JavaScript tracking codes for every website)

• today I've seen that a new table in the OWA database was very big (747 MB in a few weeks!)

  | owaa               | owa_queue_item                |     747.92 |
  +--------------------+-------------------------------+------------+   

• some other issues: login impossible from Chrome in certain situations, unique visitors count wrong when using PHP tracker (sometimes, each new visit / refresh of the page is considered as a new visitor), time-range menu not displayed at all (display stuck on 1-week range) in some cases, etc.

I'm not saying OWA is bad: Open Web Analytics is a good open-source solution, but if and only if you have time to spend, on a regular basis, on configuration issues, which I sadly don't have.

I tried Piwik very quickly. It really is a great project but:

• it doesn't offer a direct view of what I was looking for out-of-the box, i.e. clear charts for every website à la Google Analytics (I can't really describe what's the problem, but the user interface isn't handy for me)

• maybe there's an easy fix for this, but the interface is very slow

So, conclusion:

Analytics, unsolved problem.

I'm still looking for a lightweight self-hosted solution. Until then, I'll probably have to use Google Analytics again.

PS: No offence meant: most of my work is open-source too, and I know that it takes time to build a stable mature tool. This post is just reflecting the end-of-2016 situation.