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Fathom – Simple, trustworthy website analytics

usefathom.com

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Re: Fathom – Simple, trustworthy website analytics

#81
Or use the original self-hosted-at-scale open source solution, Snowplow (https://snowplowanalytics.com/). These guys have been solving self-hosted digital analytics for years now, and have consistently proven to be one of the best options for real-time digital data tracking, triggering, and analytics. Their qa/schema focus is especially nice in teams where multiple people are contributing data but you want to make sure that minimum data quality requirements are conformed to.

Re: Fathom – Simple, trustworthy website analytics

#82
post #35

This doesn't come even close to the type of data you can get from Google Analytics. It's nice as a free/open source service, but the power just isn't there. Even piwik/matomo is vastly inferior to what kind of data you can track and visualize in Google Analytics.

This is the issue I've found with every open source product. I'm perfectly happy to pay for an analytics product, so the best I've been able to find is adobe Omniture. Unfortunately that's a 30 - 100k price tag. There is definitely a market for a powerful analytics platform at a reasonable price.

You should look at Snowplow (https://snowplowanalytics.com/) which offers a good amount of power and can be self hosted or run at AWS, and is fully open source. That being said, Adobe's product has truly "enterprise" scale, governance, and industry integration across many regions, and if you have that need, few products can really get you there.

Re: Fathom – Simple, trustworthy website analytics

#83
post #2

For people looking for similar options, there's also Matomo[1] (previously Piwik) that you can self-host for free. [1] https://matomo.org/

unfortunately, matomo is harder than necessary to automatically deploy to containerized environments like heroku because they don't support the 12 factor principles [1]. a cynic might assume that this is because it would undermine their own hosted solution. [1] https://github.com/matomo-org/matomo/issues/6223 (i would use matomo if they fixed this issue)

Or they just chose a very common pattern of keeping configs in files instead and haven't gotten around to support environment variables.

Probably not a conspiracy... given that you could fork it, implement this feature, and then PR it back to the main repo...

Re: Fathom – Simple, trustworthy website analytics

#84
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go is not inherently more secure than PHP.

There's nothing stopping you deliberately writing unsecure Go code but it's harder to make errors that open up security holes in Go. For example, Go's shell exec is better than PHPs equivalent by default. https://golang.org/pkg/os/exec/

I'd actually have to do some searching to find out how to write unsecure Go code.

Re: Fathom – Simple, trustworthy website analytics

#85
post #64
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can self-host Fathom, I do. It's very basic compared to Piwik, but it runs on PostgreSQL, my DB of choice, and it's written in Go, not PHP, which means it has higher performance and is more secure.

Hey, good to see you already running Fathom! Just wanted to add that you can also use Fathom with MySQL or SQLite if that's more your cup of tea. It supports those 3 database engines right now.

Does it work with CockroachDB? It aims for compatibility with Postgres but there are some differences so some projects aren't compatible.

Re: Fathom – Simple, trustworthy website analytics

#86

Reminds me of Guag.es https://get.gaug.es/ or https://haveamint.com/ if you want to dig into the crates a bit.

I was actually just looking into gauges and Fathom yesterday and tried to set it up. Fathom seemed a bit too early stage to run it myself so I'm going to wait a bit.

I was pleasantly surprised that when I looked into gauges that the interface looks modern (unlike the screenshots on the start page) so it seems that it changed hands and is actively being developed again. I used it a while ago when it was bought up by Github.

Re: Fathom – Simple, trustworthy website analytics

#87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

unfortunately, matomo is harder than necessary to automatically deploy to containerized environments like heroku because they don't support the 12 factor principles [1]. a cynic might assume that this is because it would undermine their own hosted solution. [1] https://github.com/matomo-org/matomo/issues/6223 (i would use matomo if they fixed this issue)

Or they just chose a very common pattern of keeping configs in files instead and haven't gotten around to support environment variables. Probably not a conspiracy... given that you could fork it, implement this feature, and then PR it back to the main repo...

i looked into it about a year ago, and it would have required a rewrite of the (brittle) installer as well as supporting modules (that seemed to be dependencies of other parts of the system), not just extracting the configs into environment variables (which i did, but that didn't solve the problem). non-trivial, to say the least.

Re: Fathom – Simple, trustworthy website analytics

#88
> web services do crappy things with that data. (Hey Zuck, how was Congress?)

Is this kind of snark really necessary in top marketing copy? I get what you are saying in terms of freemiums ins and outs, but I don't know if it should be my first impression to your company's message.

To each their own, just feels a bit cheap IMHO.

Re: Fathom – Simple, trustworthy website analytics

#90
I clicked through the linked page, and it's not clear to me how to actually add analytics to my site? The instructions in the repo direct me to launch a golang daemon for what appears to be the dashboard.

It would be awesome to have a more cohesive example. Is this reading log files? Or using client-side JS? If the latter, do I have to have the Fathom server internet-facing so that the JS can report in?

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