Ask YC: what do you use for Rails web stats?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=177789

by alex_c • 18 years ago

8 10 18 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Google Analytics is great, but it has an overhead, and it's not practical for tracking AJAX requests.

AWStats is also nice, but it doesn't make use of much of the context available to a Rails app. It also doesn't have quite as much information as Analytics.

There seem to be any number of plugins available, but none of them seem to stand out above the others.

What do you guys use, if anything?

davidw• 18 years ago

Visitors: http://www.hping.org/visitors/

aupajo• 18 years ago

I've dealt with a variety of Rails apps on different scales and this is a recurring problem. I think Analytics is good for the business-types who want to use stats in their reports, but even though there's some nice features for developers, such as detecting screen resolution and browser type, it's not all that helpful tracking, say, which user is viewing what. AWStats I like too, but it can be a pain to get the trends in an Analytics fashion.

So far I've found the best solution is to build whatever important trends you want to track (ie. which readers have viewed what article) as part of your app, include Analytics anyway (it's no effort at all to add), and for any serious number crunching take a snapshot of your database to do some calculations from (off server).

Really though, if someone has a good Rails solution, they should build a plugin :)

bjclark• 18 years ago

I wonder what ever happened to Weed, the Mint rip off??!? Last I heard a V.2 was coming, but then it just fell off everyones radar.

vlad• 18 years ago

Same question, for Django.

JamesBrooks• 18 years ago

We use Analytics primarily here, I've always wanted to give RM-Manage a go (interface looks pretty).

One app we're currently trialing with scout (scoutapp.com).. looks promising so far, I haven't had a chance to go in and really look at the data produced to far though.

rms• 18 years ago

Will Urchin track AJAX requests?

anotherjesse4• 18 years ago

Yes, you can, http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...

Also their beta has event tracking that is usable from both flash & javascript - and is very useful

anotherjesse4• 18 years ago

I recommend talking to New Relic - they are in stealth but you can see a bit of what they do in the bio at http://en.oreilly.com/rails2008/public/schedule/detail/4352

Also talk with EngineYard - they are in SOMA, and are involved in the ruby community. If Ezra and his team don't know how to fix it they will know who you should talk to.

disclaimer I am an EngineYard customer

anotherjesse4• 18 years ago

New Relic is public now - http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/30/new-relic-to-monitor-pe...

We've been using it with http://dancejam.com and we are very happy. New Relic has a great product. I wish I had an account for userscripts.org as well :)

anotherjesse4• 18 years ago

For my open source site userscripts.org I use pl_analyze: http://rails-analyzer.rubyforge.org/

Unfortunately doing the analysis of the production logs daily doesn't work as it takes hours to analyze my logs (I get 400k page views not including robots a day), so I run log_rotate/pl_analyze every hour.

Each hour I get a report that looks like http://pastie.textmate.org/private/dwig0jfl5osjqq1hqoeakg

That said this isn't enough and I have ideas of how I want to fix it, but I've not had the time to implement them.

Ask YC: what do you use for Rails web stats?

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