

Ask HN: non invasive analytics tool? - loup-vaillant

I was wondering if anyone knew of a lightweight, non-invasive web site analytics tool. Something that would just look at my web server's logs, or at least would be undetectable to my visitors.<p>Also, are such systems limited, compared to Javascript or PHP based tracking?
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nl
As others have said, AWStats is ok.

 _Also, are such systems limited, compared to Javascript or PHP based
tracking?_

Yes. Javascript enabled tracking gives you a lot of additional information.
For example: screen resolution, plugins, which link was clicked on a page to
get to another page (not referer - the actual link).

It's also possible to track a user's mouse movements on a page (which can give
you heatmaps of usage on a page)

Cookie based tracking can show if a user has visited the site previously, and
track particular users throughout the site, perhaps over multiple visits.

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swwu
AWStats (<http://awstats.sourceforge.net/>) is decent if you just want some
simple log-based analytics.

Don't know what you mean by limited, but logfile-based analytics software
doesn't have access to as much data as software that can use other data
sources like cookies (ie it has difficulty tracking sessions).

If I might ask, why exactly do you need to make your analytics completely
undetectable to users? In most cases tracking pixels and the like have no
effect whatsoever on the user experience.

~~~
muyyatin
It can be practical if you don't want the site to contain JavaScript (which is
nice when using NoScript)

------
muyyatin
You may find AWStats helpful: <http://awstats.sourceforge.net/>

Most log-based analytics tools cannot filter out bot traffic as well as a
JavaScript tool would. Additionally you would be missing other information
that could be obtained from JavaScript like supported Flash versions, screen
resolution, etc.

