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Umami: Self-hosted open-source alternative to Google Analytics

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Re: Umami: Self-hosted open-source alternative to Google Analytics

#101

Post by eli »

justinclift wrote: post #100
eli wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You end up with a lot of noise from bots and crawlers (using bogus user agents) if you're just looking at server logs.

Any reasonable server side processing thing will exclude the obvious bots, which almost always have some kind of "Bot" wording in their user agent header.

There are a LOT of bots and crawlers with bogus browser user agents.

Some of the bad ones you can select see indirectly in logs because they pick UAs that almost no one uses any more. Go search your logs for IE8 or Firefox <= 70.0. Most just pick a random modern User Agent though and that's awfully hard to see in server logs.

Re: Umami: Self-hosted open-source alternative to Google Analytics

#102

Post by sorenbs »

mcao wrote: post #69

Hi everyone! Author of Umami here. I totally did not expect this response so it looks like you all hugged my little server to death. The demo should be back up now. A little background. This is a side project I started 30 days ago because I was tired of how slow and complicated Google Analytics was. I just wanted something really simple and fast that I could browse quickly without diving through layers of menus. So I…

This is a really cool project. I’m happy to see that you are using Prisma for data access. If you are interested we can set up a shared slack channel so you can provide feedback and we can make sure we support everything you need for this project :-)

Re: Umami: Self-hosted open-source alternative to Google Analytics

#103

Post by malisper »

One of the claims of Umami is that it's GDPR compliant:

> Umami does not collect any personally identifiable information so it is GDPR and CCPA compliant. No cookie notices are needed because Umami does not use cookies.

From auditing the source code, this doesn't seem to be the case. First, it claims it doesn't use cookies, but it clearly uses localStorage to store a "sessionKey"[0].

The other claim, that Umami is GDPR and CCPA compliant because it does not collect any personally identifiable information is only half true. While the data collected isn't PII (because you can't use it on it's own to identify a user), it's still "personal data". This is because the "sessionKey" stored alongside all events is actually a pseudonymous user identifier. It's really just a hash of the user's IP along with a few other properties[1]. Because the data Umami collects, when combined with some other data, can be attributed back to the user, the data is still considered "personal data". That means you're still subject to most of GDPR such as GDPR deletion requests[2].

[0] https://github.com/mikecao/umami/blob/f4ca353b5c68750bf391e5...

[1] https://github.com/mikecao/umami/blob/master/lib/session.js#...

[2] https://gdpr-info.eu/art-17-gdpr/

Re: Umami: Self-hosted open-source alternative to Google Analytics

#104

Post by anderspitman »

mcao wrote: post #69

Hi everyone! Author of Umami here. I totally did not expect this response so it looks like you all hugged my little server to death. The demo should be back up now. A little background. This is a side project I started 30 days ago because I was tired of how slow and complicated Google Analytics was. I just wanted something really simple and fast that I could browse quickly without diving through layers of menus. So I…

Since it's self-hosted, is there a reason you went postres rather than something simpler like sqlite or even flat files?

Re: Umami: Self-hosted open-source alternative to Google Analytics

#105

Post by csmiller »

bartvk wrote: post #67
asddubs wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

posthog is really unfortunately named

I don't get it either. Not a native speaker, though. So could someone explain it?

I believe they are referring to posting a picture of one's hog

Re: Umami: Self-hosted open-source alternative to Google Analytics

#106

Post by kukabynd »

vs4vijay wrote: post #23

Looks neat! will explore. Also, I did research on alternatives to GA few days back, might be helpful of someone: https://github.com/Open-Web-Analytics/Open-Web-Analytics https://matomo.org/ https://github.com/matomo-org/matomo https://github.com/usefathom/fathom https://www.goatcounter.com/ https://plausible.io/ https://github.com/PostHog/posthog https://www.usertrack.net/

Thereˆs also https://ackee.electerious.com/, quite simple but a good option.

Re: Umami: Self-hosted open-source alternative to Google Analytics

#107

Post by gentleman11 »

robinhood wrote: post #80
hanspagel wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

don’t forget https://simpleanalytics.com/

It’s not open source.

True, but it at least respects the privacy of your visitors by doing very minimal tracking. Basically, all you get is country, some device stats, and a time stamp. Last time I used it, it didn’t even track return visits and used no cookies iirc. It felt nice

Re: Umami: Self-hosted open-source alternative to Google Analytics

#108

Post by mcao »

malisper wrote: post #103

One of the claims of Umami is that it's GDPR compliant: > Umami does not collect any personally identifiable information so it is GDPR and CCPA compliant. No cookie notices are needed because Umami does not use cookies. From auditing the source code, this doesn't seem to be the case. First, it claims it doesn't use cookies, but it clearly uses localStorage to store a "sessionKey"[0]. The other claim, that Umami is GD…

I am not a lawyer so I cannot say for sure what constitutes PII and what breaches GDPR. I am using the same techniques as Fathom Analytics, Plausible.io and other products. Everything is hashed into a unique session id and none of the actual data like user agent or IP address is actually stored. It is the same data that is found in server log files. In the strictest interpretation of GDPR, I don't think any analytics product can exist.

As for the localStorage, it's just for performance so I don't have to recompute the session hash. The product will work the same without it. But seeing as it is a cause contention I am probably going to remove it.

Re: Umami: Self-hosted open-source alternative to Google Analytics

#109

Post by blahblah4332 »

mcao wrote: post #69

Hi everyone! Author of Umami here. I totally did not expect this response so it looks like you all hugged my little server to death. The demo should be back up now. A little background. This is a side project I started 30 days ago because I was tired of how slow and complicated Google Analytics was. I just wanted something really simple and fast that I could browse quickly without diving through layers of menus. So I…

This would definitely be really interesting if it had the ability to create analytics in response to UI interactions. There are a lot of SPAs out there that use analytics for feature tracking, and the self-hosted aspect would fit well with those users.

Re: Umami: Self-hosted open-source alternative to Google Analytics

#110

Post by Zaheer »

kirubakaran wrote: post #48
vs4vijay wrote: post #23

Looks neat! will explore. Also, I did research on alternatives to GA few days back, might be helpful of someone: https://github.com/Open-Web-Analytics/Open-Web-Analytics https://matomo.org/ https://github.com/matomo-org/matomo https://github.com/usefathom/fathom https://www.goatcounter.com/ https://plausible.io/ https://github.com/PostHog/posthog https://www.usertrack.net/

https://github.com/PostHog/posthog looks great for product analytics. If you've used it, can you please share your experience?

I currently use the self-hosted version on Heroku and impressed with its functionality. It's quite similar to Heap Analytics. My favorite feature is auto-tracking. That said, there are some scaling limitations currently if you have a high traffic site. We have a couple hundred thousand users monthly so we are likely on the larger side of PostHog deployments. The team is cranking out features and improvements incredibly fast and I'd expect these to be resolved soon. Feel free to DM - happy to answer any more questions.
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