

Ask YC: what do you use for Rails web stats? - alex_c

Google Analytics is great, but it has an overhead, and it's not practical for tracking AJAX requests.<p>AWStats is also nice, but it doesn't make use of much of the context available to a Rails app.  It also doesn't have quite as much information as Analytics.<p>There seem to be any number of plugins available, but none of them seem to stand out above the others.<p>What do you guys use, if anything?
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aupajo
I've dealt with a variety of Rails apps on different scales and this is a
recurring problem. I think Analytics is good for the business-types who want
to use stats in their reports, but even though there's some nice features for
developers, such as detecting screen resolution and browser type, it's not all
that helpful tracking, say, which user is viewing what. AWStats I like too,
but it can be a pain to get the trends in an Analytics fashion.

So far I've found the best solution is to build whatever important trends you
want to track (ie. which readers have viewed what article) as part of your
app, include Analytics anyway (it's no effort at all to add), and for any
serious number crunching take a snapshot of your database to do some
calculations from (off server).

Really though, if someone has a good Rails solution, they should build a
plugin :)

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anotherjesse
For my open source site userscripts.org I use pl_analyze: <http://rails-
analyzer.rubyforge.org/>

Unfortunately doing the analysis of the production logs daily doesn't work as
it takes hours to analyze my logs (I get 400k page views not including robots
a day), so I run log_rotate/pl_analyze every hour.

Each hour I get a report that looks like
<http://pastie.textmate.org/private/dwig0jfl5osjqq1hqoeakg>

That said this isn't enough and I have ideas of how I want to fix it, but I've
not had the time to implement them.

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anotherjesse
I recommend talking to New Relic - they are in stealth but you can see a bit
of what they do in the bio at
<http://en.oreilly.com/rails2008/public/schedule/detail/4352>

Also talk with EngineYard - they are in SOMA, and are involved in the ruby
community. If Ezra and his team don't know how to fix it they will know who
you should talk to.

 _disclaimer_ I am an EngineYard customer

~~~
anotherjesse
New Relic is public now - [http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/30/new-relic-to-
monitor-pe...](http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/30/new-relic-to-monitor-
performance-of-rails-applications/)

We've been using it with <http://dancejam.com> and we are very happy. New
Relic has a great product. I wish I had an account for userscripts.org as well
:)

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JamesBrooks
We use Analytics primarily here, I've always wanted to give RM-Manage a go
(interface looks pretty).

One app we're currently trialing with scout (scoutapp.com).. looks promising
so far, I haven't had a chance to go in and really look at the data produced
to far though.

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davidw
Visitors: <http://www.hping.org/visitors/>

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bjclark
I wonder what ever happened to Weed, the Mint rip off??!? Last I heard a V.2
was coming, but then it just fell off everyones radar.

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rms
Will Urchin track AJAX requests?

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anotherjesse
Yes, you can,
[http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...](http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55519)

Also their beta has event tracking that is usable from both flash & javascript
- and is very useful

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vlad
Same question, for Django.

