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Show HN: Ackee – Self-hosted website analytics

ackee.electerious.com

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Re: Show HN: Ackee – Self-hosted website analytics

#11

Post by rkwz »

orangepanda wrote: post #9

> for those who care about privacy. As a user, I dont see tracking by specifically google being the problem; what I'm against is being tracked _at all_ - by anyone, self hosted or not. There's "caring about privacy" in the subheadings, yet there's a whole section in docs about collecting private data [1]. Empty words. I've used goaccess [2] in the past to provide traffic analytics. It reads from nginx/apache logs. Yo…

I released an analytics tool earlier this week that doesn't collect PII or set cookies. All the tracking events are aggregated and you can't even see the tracking logs of a particular visitor or visitor's browser as with log based analytics.

https://github.com/sheshbabu/freshlytics

Re: Show HN: Ackee – Self-hosted website analytics

#12

Post by rkwz »

breck wrote: post #4
electerious wrote: post #2

A side project I've been working on for a while now. Ackee is a self-hosted, Node.js based analytics tool for those who care about privacy. It runs on your own server, analyses the traffic of your websites and provides useful statistics in a minimal interface. If you have any questions or feedback, just write it here :) Thanks!

Looks good! We removed analytics from our sites for privacy and simplicity reasons so I’ll consider this. Does it use JavaScript clientside or hook up to express or nginx or both? Before google analytics I remember there were a few self hosted tools in this space. Would you mind adding a list of the most current ones that people are using? I need to get caught up.

Couple of ones I can think of:

Fathom: https://github.com/usefathom/fathom

Goatcounter: https://github.com/zgoat/goatcounter

Freshlytics: https://github.com/sheshbabu/freshlytics

There's also a non-oss but privacy focussed analytics - http://simpleanalytics.com

Disclaimer: I'm the creator of Freshlytics

Re: Show HN: Ackee – Self-hosted website analytics

#13

Post by kodablah »

orangepanda wrote: post #9

> for those who care about privacy. As a user, I dont see tracking by specifically google being the problem; what I'm against is being tracked _at all_ - by anyone, self hosted or not. There's "caring about privacy" in the subheadings, yet there's a whole section in docs about collecting private data [1]. Empty words. I've used goaccess [2] in the past to provide traffic analytics. It reads from nginx/apache logs. Yo…

Why do you consider some data your browser provides as private and some others not? Not saying I disagree, but hardliners could say they don't want what the browser provides in any way as tracked. Saying this app is hypocritical because they support a different notion of privacy is akin to saying your comment is hypocritical because you say you're against being tracked at all, then talk about tracking browsers via web server logs.

I think we need to recognize privacy as a spectrum and applaud self-hosted alternatives to traditional saas services even if they don't conform to your notion of tracking.

Re: Show HN: Ackee – Self-hosted website analytics

#14

Post by donohoe »

Looks very promising. Might I also suggest a few other useful metrics:

Bounce Rate: The percentage of visitors to a particular website who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page.

Aside form that one it would be useful to track Page Views per Session, PVs per Page Type (homepage versus article page), and even Page Depth (per Page Type)

Just a thought. Still really nice.

Re: Show HN: Ackee – Self-hosted website analytics

#15

Post by technotarek »

I'm always interested in these. Would love to get off Google Analytics. Alas, they always seem to forget to offer event based interaction tracking (e.g., button clicks). Most of our core metrics are tied to events of this sort, and rolling our own separate event log doesn't satisfy our needs either.

Re: Show HN: Ackee – Self-hosted website analytics

#16

Post by dpcan »

electerious wrote: post #2

A side project I've been working on for a while now. Ackee is a self-hosted, Node.js based analytics tool for those who care about privacy. It runs on your own server, analyses the traffic of your websites and provides useful statistics in a minimal interface. If you have any questions or feedback, just write it here :) Thanks!

What happens when you start to accumulate over 5 million+ records (as an arbitrary large number)? Or a couple gigs of stats data?

We used to provide our own stats software to our customers before it became an utter nightmare of indexing databases, cron jobs, report generation, and customers stepping over their hosting quotas because of all the stats data.

Re: Show HN: Ackee – Self-hosted website analytics

#17

Post by electerious »

donohoe wrote: post #14

Looks very promising. Might I also suggest a few other useful metrics: Bounce Rate: The percentage of visitors to a particular website who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page. Aside form that one it would be useful to track Page Views per Session, PVs per Page Type (homepage versus article page), and even Page Depth (per Page Type) Just a thought. Still really nice.

Thanks for the suggestions! There's still a lot missing, but the base is ready and I can't wait to add new features.

Re: Show HN: Ackee – Self-hosted website analytics

#18

Post by electerious »

breck wrote: post #4
electerious wrote: post #2

A side project I've been working on for a while now. Ackee is a self-hosted, Node.js based analytics tool for those who care about privacy. It runs on your own server, analyses the traffic of your websites and provides useful statistics in a minimal interface. If you have any questions or feedback, just write it here :) Thanks!

Looks good! We removed analytics from our sites for privacy and simplicity reasons so I’ll consider this. Does it use JavaScript clientside or hook up to express or nginx or both? Before google analytics I remember there were a few self hosted tools in this space. Would you mind adding a list of the most current ones that people are using? I need to get caught up.

Ackee uses a JS snippet to get the data. Nginx logs won't work, but the API is fully documented and it should be possible to build an import / custom script. Could also work with express.

Re: Show HN: Ackee – Self-hosted website analytics

#19

Post by gorkemcetin »

rkwz wrote: post #12
breck wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks good! We removed analytics from our sites for privacy and simplicity reasons so I’ll consider this. Does it use JavaScript clientside or hook up to express or nginx or both? Before google analytics I remember there were a few self hosted tools in this space. Would you mind adding a list of the most current ones that people are using? I need to get caught up.

Couple of ones I can think of: Fathom: https://github.com/usefathom/fathom Goatcounter: https://github.com/zgoat/goatcounter Freshlytics: https://github.com/sheshbabu/freshlytics There's also a non-oss but privacy focussed analytics - http://simpleanalytics.com Disclaimer: I'm the creator of Freshlytics

You may want to add Countly (for both web and mobile) to that list (https://github.com/countly/countly-server) - which can be deployed on DO easily as well for free (https://marketplace.digitalocean.com/apps/countly-analytics)

Re: Show HN: Ackee – Self-hosted website analytics

#20

Post by bovermyer »

electerious wrote: post #2

A side project I've been working on for a while now. Ackee is a self-hosted, Node.js based analytics tool for those who care about privacy. It runs on your own server, analyses the traffic of your websites and provides useful statistics in a minimal interface. If you have any questions or feedback, just write it here :) Thanks!

How does this compare to Fathom?
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