
Netlify Analytics - melzarei
https://www.netlify.com/products/analytics
======
SanchoPanda
The funny thing for me is how much more intuitive this is when you run an
actual server, or vps, and how fundamental it is in that context ("Oh crap,
bunch of views, they are slowing this laptop down a bunch!") while being so
much more involved here.

I'm hesitant to generalize past myself, but I really wish someone made me
learn the basics on a web server in my own home, where I could reboot it by
pulling out a power cord, and transfer files with a usb stick. I would have
been so much more able to make thought out trade-offs or attempt grander
things.

Its straight-forward and free (at the margin) to throw up a password protected
site on a server, but daunting in SaaS world. Same story for having a bash
script update some page with a gnuplot chart with data obtained via curl/wget,
vs. CORS and an API, and a charting library, and json ...

I shudder to think of how much time I wasted as I was just learning web
anything on solutions that were way too big and complex for my goals at the
time - from docker, to lambdas, AWS orbit based nuclear powered whatever to
run a clock widget or whatnot. I'm certainly glad I learned those things, and
they are scalable and safer and all those good things, but hard to put into
context without knowing how one stupid server doing it all by itself would do
it.

This is all a drawn out way of saying that the cheapest lightsail vps is like
3 bucks a month, and you can implement all the fanciest netlify features right
on it, and if you never have done that, you really should. If anything when
you do move to netlify, you will really appreciate it on a different level.

~~~
OrwellianChild
> _lightsail vps is like 3 bucks a month, and you can implement all the
> fanciest netlify features right on it, and if you never have done that, you
> really should_

Can you expand what Netlify features you're talking about or provide any
guides/links that would steer a newbie in the right direction? I appreciate
the "back to basics" attitude, but don't know where to even get started...

~~~
SanchoPanda
Hackiest way - pick the wordpress VPS options for $3.50, then sub out the
wordpress homepage with your static site

Poor Man's Netlify identity - Apache or nginx password rules.

Poor Man's Netlify Large Media Management - Upload some files over sftp.

Poor Man's Netlify Lambda functions - crontab -e, 0 * * * *
LynxDumpWeatherToHomepage.sh.

Poor Man's Netlify Teams - Create a new user with access to that site.

Poor Man's Netlify Forms - A php form.

Poor Man's Netlify Analytics - Less +F (or tail -f) web.log file.

^^ This is isn't tax, legal, or sysadmin advice. SanchoPanda doesn't offer
tax, legal, or sysadmin advice. Please consult your tax, legal, or sysadmin
advisor before making any tax, legal, or web infrastructure related decisions.

~~~
shriek
I'm curious how a cronjob would be used as Lambda functions here? I'd have
expected it to be CGI here instead.

Do note that I'm not encouraging people to use CGI for their serverless needs
whatsoever but if we're going back to basic then CGI is the closest thing I
can think of for serverless.

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iooi
Seems like a big miss on their part. I love Netlify and I use them for my
personal site. When I got their newsletter email announcing this, the first
thought that entered my head was: "Finally! I can take Google Analytics off my
site. About time a serious contender took on GA."

Unfortunately this costs $108/year more than GA. And while there are a couple
of GA alternatives out there, having the financial backing of someone like
Netlify makes a big difference. I don't want to think about analytics, I just
want to know roughly how much traffic my site is getting, not having to worry
about an open source project dying in the next year and having to find yet
another replacement.

~~~
cameronbrown
GA is nice for client-side stuff, but Adblock has made the numbers completely
unreliable, especially for tech-focused content. Instead I prefer to just use
server-side logs. At my tiny scale it's easy to just assume each IP is a
unique, and people are free to block GA without affecting my metrics.

~~~
usmannk
What solutions do you recommend for server side logging? I've come to a
similar conclusion as you as far as what's actually reasonably necessary.

~~~
cameronbrown
Honestly I just wrote a small set of functions to log everything to Google
Analytics via its measurement protocol[0]. I know I said I didn't use it
client-side, but the dashboard is still top-notch for exploring analytics data
and there's a ton of processing it does for free - IP to location is one.

I also stream all logs into text files so I can process them later too.

[0][https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection...](https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/protocol/v1/)

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pcmaffey
This makes a ton of sense of for Netlify, and I hope they keep improving on
it. If this existed 5 months ago I might not have rolled my own analytics
using Netlify functions and Google Spreadsheets^. As it is, $9 per site, and
an inability to log client-side routing make it not worth switching from my
own, super customizable event-based solution (would have to come up with a new
API schema for calling URLs to log specific events / goals).

^I wrote about it here: [https://www.pcmaffey.com/roll-your-own-
analytics](https://www.pcmaffey.com/roll-your-own-analytics)

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bastawhiz
This is excellent. The first thing I did was remove GA. It's also incredible
that they backfill data.

Yes, it costs money. But this is exactly what I want, and Netlify now has a
significant incentive not to do anything shady with the data (and by not using
cookies or JavaScript, they hamstring any potential ability to sell the data
anyway).

Good work, I'm glad to be a Netlify customer.

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andrewbarba
The funny thing about this is tons of developers are using Netlify for SPA's
and therefore only that first request will be caught by their edge nodes, all
subsequent page views will be missed.

~~~
swyx
(i work there) lets just say this has not escaped our attention and we even
discussed holding off launching until we had an easy way to log an incremental
pageview from the clientside. ultimately we decided to ship first and iterate
later. limiting the scope was definitely helpful running up to the launch.

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oddevan
Was hoping for free, but honestly? If I’m serious about having good data, I’ll
pay the $9/month to not be dependent on Google.

~~~
willnz
It's $9 per site though :(

Clicky, a freemium alternative to Google Analytics costs $10 per month for
their Pro plan but that includes 10 websites.

Or Clicky's Pro Platinum plan costs $20 per month for 30 websites.

Kind of wish Netlify had gone with similar pricing

~~~
dguo
I wish the pricing scaled with traffic instead of being a flat rate per site.

~~~
geraltofrivia
Yes! I have a static personal page, hosted via github pages, where I just want
barebones information about how many people visit the page, from which country
etc. I get maybe 10 visits per week. I probably won't pay 9$ for this.

Currently using ticksel.com

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futhey
That landing page does not have a single screenshot of what you get for $9 per
month. Do you pay the $9 and then find out what the analytics page you're
getting is going to look like, and if it's suitable for your website?

~~~
ksec
This, At least some screenshots or Demo. And it is only for 250,000 view /
month.

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mcjiggerlog
At $9/month I think I'll just keep doing what I've been doing so far -
throwing Cloudflare in front of the Netlify app and using their free
analytics.

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hmhrex
Congratulations Netlify on launching this! I'm all for simple, non-tracking
analytics, and this perfect for that use.

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spondyl
I'd purchase this, not because I'm likely to look at it often, but because
Netlify provides me a great deal of value that I don't even pay for. It may be
more than the cost of Google Analytics, but they've earned my money I think.

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segphault
I've been hoping that somebody would do this for quite some time. I previously
experimented with using CloudFront logs in GoAccess for awhile for my personal
blog in order to avoid invasive JavaScript-based tracking, but it was too much
trouble to maintain.

I really like the idea of the CDN provider offering this as a service that
requires no effort and provides a nice interactive dashboard.

The pricing on this is unfortunately too much for me to justify using it for
my personal site, but I'd happily use it for anything more substantive.

~~~
chasers
I built Logflare for Cloudflare. A good example of what you’re talking about I
think. [https://logflare.app](https://logflare.app)

~~~
vageli
> I built Logflare for Cloudflare. A good example of what you’re talking about
> I think. [https://logflare.app](https://logflare.app)

Total aside, but I really love the feel of your site. Very polished and I love
the way the tool is presented (not to mention that it seems like a useful
service to boot!).

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HeavenFox
"Sessions are tracked anonymously without cookies or personally identifying
information like IP addresses."

Very curious how they are able to do this

~~~
swyx
good catch! i believe this was a misstatement and have requested we change
this wording. for the time being what’s on the docs is what we have
[https://www.netlify.com/docs/analytics/](https://www.netlify.com/docs/analytics/)

~~~
odensc
But the docs say the same thing?

[https://www.netlify.com/docs/analytics/#how-it-
works](https://www.netlify.com/docs/analytics/#how-it-works)

> Because site activity is tracked anonymously without cookies or personally
> identifying information, [...]

~~~
swyx
not quite the same - that statement is more accurate than saying "sessions".
"sessions" has a contextual meaning in analytics and our marketing copy
misused the term.

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corybrown
Really excited about this, I miss the days of static server-side logs!

Pricing is a bit high for my super-low-traffic hobby sites, unfortunately. But
I'm glad they're doing this!

~~~
lucb1e
For hobby sites, I guess the owner might be fine with grepping logs or
installing webalizer anyway. Those who really need this are developers at
companies where the boss thinks they need it. I've tried to push for
Statcounter just to stay away from Google, but bossman eventually wanted
Google. This is yet another tool in the belt for being able to work without
Google, and for a company (even a small business), 9 euros a month is very
little.

~~~
corybrown
But I don't think Netlify provides logs, so that's not an option, right?

~~~
lucb1e
But your web server does.

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bravura
What is the best server-side analytics package for Django?

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johnymontana
I'm curious about comparing my Netlify Analytics numbers to my Google
Analytics numbers. I'm seeing a lot more users and page views on Netlify
Analytics. I know that GA can be blocked client side, but does GA exclude
bot/crawler traffic from stats as well? Or can I assume that the difference
between GA and Netlify Analytics numbers are due to adblock / noscript / etc?

~~~
swyx
i cant speak to GA but just dropping by to point to the docs
[https://www.netlify.com/docs/analytics/](https://www.netlify.com/docs/analytics/)
for details on the numbers. it’s IP based, and some filtering is done as
described

“The Pageviews and Top pages charts include only responses with Content-Type:
text/html and a status code of 200, 201, or 304. We filter the data by status
code this way so that we don’t count errors or double count redirects. This
also applies to the Pageviews total for your site. Unique visitors counts
different IP addresses engaging with your site within a single day. If someone
loads pages of your site on multiple different days, they will be counted as a
unique visitor for each day. The Unique visitors total for your site is a sum
of the daily numbers.”

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miguelmota
I've been a happy (free tier) customer of Netlify for the past few months.
Their UI is really intuitive and they have great documentation.

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jedberg
Their marketing on this is brilliant. They're capitalizing on the growing
adblock/jsblock trend to point out that server side analytics are more
accurate.

To be fair, back in the day when you had a single web server, analytics was
easy. I to miss the days of being able to do a 'tail -f web.log' and watch as
your page hit Slashdot...

~~~
adrianratnapala
> ... and watch as your page hit Slashdot...

And then fall over?

I miss the days of The Slashdot Effect[1]. Now it's the JS that makes my PC
fall over.

[1] Come to think of it _The Slashdot Effect_ would have been a good band name
back in the '90s.

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ryanworl
What is Netlify using for the underlying data storage and query engine?

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seanwilson
Do they give you a way to track conversions? e.g. if someone signed up to a
newsletter or bought a product, and where that user came from?

