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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

#31

Post by electerious »

technotarek wrote: post #15

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.

Event tracking is probably the best way learn more about your uses. It's something I will definitely look into as soon as all the basics are done.

I've created an issue for it if you want to keep an eye on the progress: https://github.com/electerious/Ackee/issues/40

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

#32

Post by electerious »

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…

> There's "caring about privacy" in the subheadings, yet there's a whole section in docs about collecting private data [1]. Empty words.

The advanced tracking is turned off by default. Ackee will never store a browsing history of a user and tries it best to keep tracked data anonymised.

It's all about finding a balance between privacy and analytics. At the end it's still an analytics tool and there would be nothing to show without data.

Using "nginx/apache logs" and "what browsers send anyway" is more than Ackee tracks by default. Storing and analysing this data isn't even allowed by the GDPR without asking the user.

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

#33

Post by electerious »

zebnyc wrote: post #26

I presume I have to include a `cookie` tracking acceptance modal for GDPR compliance. Correct?

Ackee only tracks page views, site visits and referrers by default. It stores no IPs and it's not possible to view the browsing history of a user. The data can't be used to identify a user and should therefore be GDPR compliant.

But: I'm not a lawyer. I can't give you a legally certain statement. It's hard to say what's "identifiable data" according to the GDPR.

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

#34

Post by electerious »

wzy wrote: post #30

How did you come up with that name?

All started with my self-hosted photo-management tool Lychee (https://lychee.electerious.com). We named it Lychee because we had some lychees on the desk while working on the first version. It was the only cool name we could come up with.

All my tools/webapps after Lychee are somehow following the same species or clade: Rosid, Malvid and now Ackee.

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

#35

Post by electerious »

bildung wrote: post #7
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!

Piwik/Matomo is a popular tool in the same space. How would you compare Ackee to Matomo (tech aside)?

Piwik/Matomo is more like Google Analytics in the way it works and what you can do with it. Ackee will never be a replacement if you need full-featured marketing analytics with tons of options and insights. Ackee tries to be less. Lightweight, easy to install and with a good balance between analytics and privacy.

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

#36

Post by electerious »

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.

> What happens when you start to accumulate over 5 million+ records

I don't think Ackee is the right tool if your site as so many visitors. And to be honest: I don't know what will happen at this scale. There shouldn't be a problem as long as MongoDB can handle it.

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

#37

Post by huhtenberg »

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.

> Bounce Rate

This requires tracking sessions.

> Page Views per Session

This requires cookies or some other mechanism for stringing individual page hits into a single stream. While you can, sort of, kind of, do that based on the source IP combined with the user-agent (like this project does), it's not terribly accurate and it can't track longer sessions.

I would argue that very few people object to being tracked by the site they are actually visiting. Most object to being tracked by 3rd parties, and across multiple unrelated sites. So a simple 1st party cookie is quite acceptable, but you can certainly go an extra mile and ask even if it can be set.

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

#38

Post by acidburnNSA »

electerious wrote: post #35
bildung wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Piwik/Matomo is a popular tool in the same space. How would you compare Ackee to Matomo (tech aside)?

Piwik/Matomo is more like Google Analytics in the way it works and what you can do with it. Ackee will never be a replacement if you need full-featured marketing analytics with tons of options and insights. Ackee tries to be less. Lightweight, easy to install and with a good balance between analytics and privacy.

What about vs. the old perl script, awstats? I'm still using that, amazingly, after like 15 years. It does the basics fairly well, if a little ugly. I'm always looking for new cool stuff though.

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

#40

Post by nodesocket »

electerious wrote: post #36
dpcan wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> What happens when you start to accumulate over 5 million+ records I don't think Ackee is the right tool if your site as so many visitors. And to be honest: I don't know what will happen at this scale. There shouldn't be a problem as long as MongoDB can handle it.

Agree, just make sure you are running a modern version of MongoDB with WiredTiger storage engine and the server has enough memory. It should be able to handle 5 million records on modest hardware.
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