
Need "Custom" Analytics? Not So Fast - pkrein
https://segment.io/academy/need-custom-analytics-not-so-fast
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alexatkeplar
Interesting article, but the choice isn't truly a binary one between a SaaS
solution and hand-rolling everything from scratch... Snowplow is a pre-rolled
opensource analytics stack which runs on AWS, so it's pretty minimal in terms
of developer effort and maintenance, _and you get to own all your data_.

<https://github.com/snowplow/snowplow> |
<http://snowplowanalytics.com/analytics/index.html>

(And it's easy to build Chartio dashboards on top of Snowplow data - we're big
fans of Chartio.)

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StavrosK
I started building a custom analytics solution like this, you basically passed
all the data you wanted to it (from however disparate sources you like), and
you could write custom Lua scripts to process them in whatever way you wanted.
It had a pretty simple widget/graph API that allowed you to basically return
JSON to be turned into a full dashboard.

I didn't manage to get anyone to want to try it out in the year I was looking
for potential customers, so I shut it down in the end.

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mwetzler
Sounds like our API (Keen IO)! We offer simple client libraries for sending &
querying the data. Still going strong over a year later and developers keep
telling us how much they love the API. I think going through an accelerator,
having some successful blog posts here on Hacker News, and using twitter
effectively are what helped us spread the word and develop early traction.

~~~
StavrosK
It was similar, but more powerful. Your API has a some predefined functions
one can run on the data, the one I built had fully programmable capabilities,
with any metric interacting with any other, from any time frame, etc.

~~~
mwetzler
Cool, sounds kind of like bitdeli?

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StavrosK
Yep, that looks similar to what I was building.

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waynesonfire
some neat tools described in this article, any open source (self-hosting)
alternatives available? ... openTSDB looks neat for instance.

