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

umami.is

131–140 of 235 posts

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

#131
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…

Matomo (former Piwik) is an alternative imho.

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

#132
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, but so what? There are plenty of blacklists maintained for all sorts of things, and no metric is perfect. Some really rudimentary filtering or AI methods could get you pretty good data.

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

#134
post #108

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…

It doesn't matter if the UA or IP is stored, even using them to fingerprint a user requires GDPR consent.

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

#135
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…

Matomo (former Piwik) is an alternative imho.

Unsure about Umami's performance, but Piwik was a non-starter for several higher traffic sites I worked with due to performance issues (even after throwing big hardware at it).

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

#136

I'd love to use this. But 34 dependencies? I know ~10 of them are React, and there's some in there that make sense. But I haven't got the time to audit them all, and re-audit it every time any of those dependencies update . And escape-string-regexp? Really? it's literally 2 lines of code [0]. Why have I got to give the maintainer of that project commit access to this program that will be seeing potentially sensitive…

Would you also criticize someone for using Apache Commons StringUtils? The fetishization of critiquing npm package choices is hilarious.

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

#137
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a bunch of Github "awesome software" lists. One thing I haven't seen is someone categorize open source web traffic analytics into Client Side Analytics (via javascript) and Web Server Log analytics. Since each approach drastically changes the data collected and reported.

Are there any all-in-one-ish solutions that attempt to do both? i.e. collects both (or one of either) server logs and client side analytics, normalize them, etc.

Matomo does provide an alternative to leverage web server log files (beyond the usual client side javascript)...using a python script: https://matomo.org/faq/log-analytics-tool/

When i first migrated (my personal sites) away from GA, i was concerned about performance, so was considering using server logs, and stumbled upon this feature of matomo. The javascript approach ended up not being the performance issue that i thought it would be...so i never ended up using the python script...So your mileage may vary, but to your question, this does exist.

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

#138

How useful are the metrics from non-GA sources trusted when validated traffic to various groups like investors, advertisers, etc?

Quite intriguing! I have no experience pitching to investors or advertisers, (but i do have web analytics exp.) and never would have thought that this would even be a question! Curious, is this something that you encountered, or is this hypothetical?

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

#139
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It doesn't matter if the UA or IP is stored, even using them to fingerprint a user requires GDPR consent.

Consent is only one potential basis for processing under GDPR. There are others such as "legitimate interest" which the controller and/or processor may rely on.

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

#140
noticed you didn't write any tests: https://github.com/mikecao/umami

What was your reasoning? Personally, I write tests for all my projects, it forces me to really think hard about how to break down the different components and functionalities and it helps others feel more confident to contribute.

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