A few thingz
Joseph Basquin
07/11/2024
#analytics
TinyAnalytics
After having tested many open-source website analytics tool, and haven't found exactly what I was looking for, I started a minimalist project (coded in PHP) that only does this:
-
number of visits per day
- display the referrers (i.e. the people who have a link to your website)
If you're looking for a tool lighter than Piwik, Open Web Analytics or Google Analytics, then TinyAnalytics might be what you're looking for.
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).
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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)
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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.