Show HN: Measuring Events with Google Analytics

It's an interesting idea, but you must understand the limitations of GA. After around 250k events it will start sampling your data. From personal experience, this is very limiting. There's also a not-insignificant delay between the data being sent to GA and extracting it out. From what I could tell, it's also non-deterministic, so you might get some events processed and to show, but others will not show for a while.

To give some context: I created an A/B test framework that (can also) use GA as a backend[0]. However, given this limitation I changed direction and created a backend using AWS Lambda and Redis[1], and also later explored using AWS Lambda with Google BigQuery[2] as a backend.

For small / medium scale, I would still stick to something like Graphite though. You can fit quite a bit of event traffic even on a low-end VPS these days. If you need to scale up, then either a hosted solution like the ones you mentioned, or building something on top of BigQuery (or keen.io) seems like a better approach than relying on GA.

[0] https://github.com/Alephbet/alephbet

[1] https://github.com/Alephbet/gimel

[2] http://blog.gingerlime.com/2016/a-scalable-analytics-backend...