Hacker News Reader

Comment by electerious | Hacker News Reader

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!

View on HN

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.

Log file analytics does not work with Javascript apps.

True, but log file analytics work despite JavaScript being disabled in the browser.

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.

I can't speak to the OP's performance, but Snowplow[1] may be good for your use. It's a bit more general purpose than just pure web analytics, and doesn't come with the reporting interface. But as far as the data collection and storage at scale aspect, it's fantastic.

[1] https://snowplowanalytics.com/products/snowplow-open-source/

If your reports are predefined - summarised and no adhoc reporting needed, you can look into the continuous view feature of PipelineDB - http://docs.pipelinedb.com/continuous-views.html

> As soon as a stream row has been read by the continuous views that must read it, it is discarded. Raw, granular data is not stored anywhere. The only data that is persisted for a continuous view is whatever is returned by running a SELECT * FROM that_view. Thus you can think of a continuous view as a very high-throughput, realtime materialized view.

I use PipelineDB continuous views in Freshlytics - https://github.com/sheshbabu/freshlytics/blob/master/src/ser...

TimescaleDB also has something called "Continuous Aggregates" - https://docs.timescale.com/latest/using-timescaledb/continuo... but I haven't looked into it much.

> 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.

Looks good! We removed analytics from our sites for privacy and simplicity reasons so I’ll consider this. Does it use JavaScript clientside or hook up to express or nginx or both?

Before google analytics I remember there were a few self hosted tools in this space. Would you mind adding a list of the most current ones that people are using? I need to get caught up.

Couple of ones I can think of:

Fathom: https://github.com/usefathom/fathom

Goatcounter: https://github.com/zgoat/goatcounter

Freshlytics: https://github.com/sheshbabu/freshlytics

There's also a non-oss but privacy focussed analytics - http://simpleanalytics.com

Disclaimer: I'm the creator of Freshlytics

You may want to add Countly (for both web and mobile) to that list (https://github.com/countly/countly-server) - which can be deployed on DO easily as well for free (https://marketplace.digitalocean.com/apps/countly-analytics)

Snowplow is another: https://snowplowanalytics.com/products/snowplow-open-source/

Ackee uses a JS snippet to get the data. Nginx logs won't work, but the API is fully documented and it should be possible to build an import / custom script. Could also work with express.

How does this compare to Fathom?

Ackee and Fathom are very similar. Both in the way they display data and how they process it. The biggest advantages of Ackee (compared to Fathom) are probably:

- A documented REST API that lets you build upon Ackee. Could be used for custom import scripts or apps that display your current visitor stats in the menu bar. - Ackee allows you to track more than just page/site views (browser, system, etc.). This is optional and off by default, but great for people/companies that need more insights.

Fathom definitely has a head start, while Ackee is very young. Can't wait to see how Fathom v2 will look like and how both will compare in the future.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com