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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

#21

Post by rambojazz »

kodablah wrote: post #13
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 we…

Browsers send too much information on their own, and they shouldn't. But there is still a huge difference between analyzing access logs and tracking users. When you actively track users you build complete profiles of people with any kind of information. Access logs do not go nearly as far, they're mostly limited to IP address, a few info about browser/OS type, and sometimes a referrer; most of which are easy to spoof.

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

#22

Post by cosmie »

dpcan wrote: post #16
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.

I can't speak to the OP's performance, but Snowplow[1] may be good for your use. It's a bit more general purpose than just pure web analytics, and doesn't come with the reporting interface. But as far as the data collection and storage at scale aspect, it's fantastic.

[1] https://snowplowanalytics.com/products/snowplow-open-source/

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

#23

Post by cosmie »

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

Snowplow is another: https://snowplowanalytics.com/products/snowplow-open-source/

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

#24

Post by rkwz »

dpcan wrote: post #16
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.

If your reports are predefined - summarised and no adhoc reporting needed, you can look into the continuous view feature of PipelineDB - http://docs.pipelinedb.com/continuous-views.html

> As soon as a stream row has been read by the continuous views that must read it, it is discarded. Raw, granular data is not stored anywhere. The only data that is persisted for a continuous view is whatever is returned by running a SELECT * FROM that_view. Thus you can think of a continuous view as a very high-throughput, realtime materialized view.

I use PipelineDB continuous views in Freshlytics - https://github.com/sheshbabu/freshlytics/blob/master/src/ser...

TimescaleDB also has something called "Continuous Aggregates" - https://docs.timescale.com/latest/using-timescaledb/continuo... but I haven't looked into it much.

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

#25

Post by AndrewStephens »

This looks nice and clean. Is it all domain based, or can I drill down to view hits of individual URLs.

+1 for self-hosting analytics, something I encourage everyone to do if you have the time to devote to it. I dislike sites handing my browsing habits off to random third-parties.

Obviously, really large sites need more sophisticated analytics but for most sites something like GoogleAnalytics is complete overkill. It grabs information that nobody except Google's machine learning bots are ever going to look at.

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

#27

Post by electerious »

bovermyer wrote: post #20
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?

Ackee and Fathom are very similar. Both in the way they display data and how they process it. The biggest advantages of Ackee (compared to Fathom) are probably:

- A documented REST API that lets you build upon Ackee. Could be used for custom import scripts or apps that display your current visitor stats in the menu bar. - Ackee allows you to track more than just page/site views (browser, system, etc.). This is optional and off by default, but great for people/companies that need more insights.

Fathom definitely has a head start, while Ackee is very young. Can't wait to see how Fathom v2 will look like and how both will compare in the future.

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

#28

Post by darekkay »

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…

> What I'm against is being tracked _at all_ - by anyone, self hosted or not. > I've used goaccess. It reads from nginx/apache logs.

While I'm using GoAccess myself and I too recommend it over using JS libraries, your server logs usually contain private data as well (user agent, ip address).

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

#29

Post by electerious »

AndrewStephens wrote: post #25

This looks nice and clean. Is it all domain based, or can I drill down to view hits of individual URLs. +1 for self-hosting analytics, something I encourage everyone to do if you have the time to devote to it. I dislike sites handing my browsing habits off to random third-parties. Obviously, really large sites need more sophisticated analytics but for most sites something like GoogleAnalytics is complete overkill. It…

Glad you like it!

There's still a lot missing in Ackee, but even with all the features I'm planning to add it will never be a full replacement for Google Analytics. And I think that's the best about Ackee. Because not everyone needs full-featured marketing analytics with tons of options and insights.

Ackee can also show page views, but it's not implemented in the UI, yet. This is the same for browser, system, visit duration and other insights (all of them are optional to track and turned off by default). Keep an eye on https://github.com/electerious/Ackee/issues/35 to know when it's ready.

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