Keen IO builds your custom analytics infrastructure so you don’t have to

http://venturebeat.com/2014/07/01/keen-io-builds-your-custom-analytics-infrastructure-so-you-dont-have-to/

by mwetzler • 12 years ago

72 24 12 years ago

bagels2• 12 years ago

You grant us a... fully paid license to use the Content... for purposes of providing the Services... to other users of the Services

They want a license to give my data away to other customers?

dkador3• 12 years ago

(Disclaimer: founder of Keen IO here.)

That's a bit misleading, I think. The full paragraph:

You are solely responsible for any content and other material that you submit, publish, transmit, or display on, through, or with our Services (“Content”). You grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free and fully paid license to use the Content, as necessary, for purposes of providing the Services to you and other users of the Services. All rights in and to the Content not expressly granted to us in this Agreement are reserved by you.

Anyways, legal mumbo jumbo aside (we obviously could make this clearer), we absolutely don't sell or give your data to anybody but you. That's one of the major differences between us and some other analytics companies. Your data is yours and we won't monetize it.

bagels2• 12 years ago

Thanks for the clarification. I wasn't trying to mislead anyone, I just wanted to know what license keen claims on the data we'd be providing.

josephlord• 12 years ago

Does this mean that you don't sell or use aggregated data? Others TOS in this space often seem to permit that and it has put me off in the past.

Will definitely consider keen.io on next project.

gtaylor3• 12 years ago

Can anyone who has used or is using these guys share some feedback on your experiences? Also, if anyone knows of any other services that allow you send event data like this for later querying/analysis, I'd love to hear about them. Keen IO seems to be exactly what we're looking for, conceptually.

johns• 12 years ago

We use it quite extensively and it's been great. The API is really well designed and hasn't limited us at all. Being able to send arbitrary event schemas is nice too. We were able to re-use an existing JSON document format with only minor changes which means we don't have to do a lot of mapping back and forth. I highly recommend them.

(Disclosure: we partner with Keen IO on some product stuff, but we pay for our account for the analytics stuff just like anyone else.)

dkador3• 12 years ago

Thanks, John. Best part of this job is hearing from happy customers. :)

Asparagirl• 12 years ago

I use them for a side project (access logs and stats on an API I built) and they are great. Easy to set up, new features coming out every once in a while (some of them community-build hacks) and the one time they had an outage a while back they had a ridiculously detailed post-mortem.

Also, I'm on the free plan, so really, can't beat that. :-)

eli2• 12 years ago

On some level Mixpanel is a competitor. You can send it events and query/extract them later. Mixpanel is geared towards app/web analytics and marketing-type purposes. Mixpanel gives you some tools for building queries and reports and lets you export to Excel. Keen is geared towards developers. You can build charts that you can embed in other webpages (which is very cool) but building the queries kinda needs API access.

If you're creating a custom analytics tool that integrates tightly with your system, Keen might be a better choice. Especially if you're going to e.g. let your customers view and analyze their own data (but not see anyone else's), Keen is a no brainer. It's got a better API and much better API security model.

If you're looking for something more akin to a Google Analytics replacement but event-based instead of pageview-based, Mixpanel or similar might be better.

Keen and Mixpanel both had great support, by the way. I'd encourage you to reach out to one or both if you're curious about how to integrate with it.

gtaylor3• 12 years ago

We looked at Mixpanel, but Keen seems to be more in line with what we need.

Thanks for the response, this is helpful.

howardr• 12 years ago

We use Keen a lot on our engineering team. In our case we send them a lot of a events, but only query a few dozen times a month. However those queries are done in times when we need to quickly query data. Saved our ass a few times since started using it. They have libs on all of the languages we use. There is no excuse for a frontend dev or backend dev on any team to just log as much data as they can. That's the key...the barrier is low enough where there really is no excuse AND you don't have dev ops screaming at you sending too much data.

Most of our non technical people can't use the dashboard (I think this is from lack of effort rather than something wrong on Keen's side), but it is powerful and easy to use. Someone doesn't have to know SQL or Hadoop to get what they want.

Anyways YMMV but we have really liked using it.

EDIT: like others have posted want to also say that they have great customer service. Have had no issues but feel like they have made sure I could get in touch if I needed to

salman89• 12 years ago

I like Heap's (https://heapanalytics.com) approach - capture everything, query later. Depending on your needs (Heap is front-end UI oriented), might not be the right fit.

noinput• 12 years ago

Nothing but great things to say about Keen.

I first found them when testing services via Segment.io and after spending a morning digesting the docs I realized it's what I needed for my company (at the time) to build a simple and scalable tracking/reporting API with. They reached out shortly after, and discussed my needs, offered help modeling the data layer with us and worked out an enterprise deal, the legal, etc. I realized early on they like working the hard challenges and helping us was fun for them.

For side projects as well as my current venture, I use them for tracking near everything, and the simple charting right in their interface makes it pretty easy to make quick decisions and break down the data.

I collect about 4mm events a month these days for my most successful project, and their APIs are still super fast and require zero up-keep from my end.

Congrats to Ryan & Nick over there for the success!

fomojola2• 12 years ago

Excellent interface: the docs are a little opaque in places but all in all one of the best implementations I've worked with. Their use of scoped keys (https://keen.io/docs/security/) to allow client-side data access is pretty awesome: very surprised that I haven't seen more usage of the technique in other data providers. The ability to provide client dashboards that directly access Keen's servers from within our web app without needing to proxy the data through us is simply awesome.

mwetzler4• 12 years ago

Wow, thanks for the kind words! I'm blushing over here. I wrote a big portion of our docs and would love to know which parts could be fleshed out more (I can think of a few areas but I'm curious what you think).

fomojola2• 12 years ago

You're welcome: Keen's been great to work with. Mostly just organization: as far as I can tell you've recently started maintaining some of the docs at the Github repo, but much of the original writeups were on https://keen.io/docs/clients/javascript/reference/. It makes it a little confusing jumping around and linking back and forth when you trying to figure out how to do a new thing. For my money (not much of it, but its what I have) Stripe's API doc reference (https://stripe.com/docs/api) which wraps both the concepts and the code samples into a nice little ball are still the gold standard.

gtaylor3• 12 years ago

I didn't notice the scoped keys before, but this would definitely be useful to us. Thanks for pointing it out.

Keen IO builds your custom analytics infrastructure so you don’t have to

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