8 ms·

Netlify Analytics

172 points by melzarei 7y ago

bravura 7y ago
What is the best server-side analytics package for Django?
andrewbarba 7y ago
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.
- timwis 7y ago
  Woops
- prophesi 7y ago
  Should be noted that Netlify provides a lot of tools for JAMstack sites, like their Netlify CMS (which you can self-host if you're determined) and Netlify Functions. If you need the SPA framework for productivity reasons, then you could use something like Gridsome to have it generate a static site.
- swyx 7y ago
  (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.
- mfrye0 7y ago
  I was thinking the same. Realistically, I believe the only way you could do that on the client would be JS. But if they added that, it would change all their feel good marketing about no JS...
hmhrex 7y ago
Congratulations Netlify on launching this! I'm all for simple, non-tracking analytics, and this perfect for that use.
corybrown 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    But I don't think Netlify provides logs, so that's not an option, right?
    - lucb1e 7y ago
      But your web server does.
  - flukus 7y ago
    > Those who really need this are developers at companies where the boss thinks they need it. I think that hits the nail on the head. For most usages of GA the product they are selling is pretty graphs that management are convinced they need, any actual actionable insight they can give is secondary to that and I'd bet used but a small fraction of GA users.
iooi 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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.
    - dragonsh 7y ago
      Try https://goaccess.io/ https://goaccess.io/ works very well for us with haproxy cluster and rsyslog for central logging for all web and api requests. We run goaccess in real-time mode processing 100000 requests per day with local ip to city database.
    - aldoushuxley001 7y ago
      I've always heard GoAccess recommended as the go-to solution for server side logging. Though I don't have personal experience with it, it does look amazing.
    - 7y ago
jedberg 7y ago
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...
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- adrianratnapala 7y ago
  > ... 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.
oddevan 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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 $20 per month for 30 websites. Kind of wish Netlify had gone with similar pricing
  - dguo 7y ago
    I wish the pricing scaled with traffic instead of being a flat rate per site.
    - geraltofrivia 7y ago
      Yes! I have a static personal page, hosted via github pages, where I just want barebones information about how many people visit the page, from which country etc. I get maybe 10 visits per week. I probably won't pay 9$ for this. Currently using ticksel.com
segphault 7y ago
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.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- chasers 7y ago
  I built Logflare for Cloudflare. A good example of what you’re talking about I think. https://logflare.app https://logflare.app
  - vageli 7y ago
    > 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!).
HeavenFox 7y ago
"Sessions are tracked anonymously without cookies or personally identifying information like IP addresses." Very curious how they are able to do this
- october_sky 7y ago
  I would bet by fingerprinting the visitor's browser window: https://panopticlick.eff.org/ https://panopticlick.eff.org/
- roskilli 7y ago
  Might be using browser local storage APIs? Hah. I imagine you could also do some kind of web socket/long poll and try to fingerprint the connection a little so there’s high likelihood it’s the same session when it reconnects between page loads.
- swyx 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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 7y ago
      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.
- youngtaff 7y ago
  It's possible to track using TLS session resumption techniques but who knows whether they're doing this
johnymontana 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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.”
SanchoPanda 7y ago
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.
- bfred_it 7y ago
  This is the same exact comment I see on most HN posts about services. Probably most people’s time in maintenance and development is worth more than $9/month, that’s why these services exist. Semi-related xkcd https://xkcd.com/1319/ https://xkcd.com/1319/
  - dc_gregory 7y ago
    No, its not. The OP has a different point to make, and its worth a re-read!
- OrwellianChild 7y ago
  > 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...
ryanworl 7y ago
What is Netlify using for the underlying data storage and query engine?
miguelmota 7y ago
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.
bastawhiz 7y ago
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.
pcmaffey 7y ago
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
seanwilson 7y ago
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?
spondyl 7y ago
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.
mcjiggerlog 7y ago
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.
futhey 7y ago
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 7y ago
  This, At least some screenshots or Demo. And it is only for 250,000 view / month.

172 points by melzarei 7y ago

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

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.

timwis 7y ago
Woops
prophesi 7y ago
Should be noted that Netlify provides a lot of tools for JAMstack sites, like their Netlify CMS (which you can self-host if you're determined) and Netlify Functions. If you need the SPA framework for productivity reasons, then you could use something like Gridsome to have it generate a static site.
swyx 7y ago
(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.
mfrye0 7y ago
I was thinking the same. Realistically, I believe the only way you could do that on the client would be JS. But if they added that, it would change all their feel good marketing about no JS...

hmhrex 7y ago

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

corybrown 7y ago

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 7y ago
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 7y ago
  But I don't think Netlify provides logs, so that's not an option, right?
  - lucb1e 7y ago
    But your web server does.
- flukus 7y ago
  > Those who really need this are developers at companies where the boss thinks they need it. I think that hits the nail on the head. For most usages of GA the product they are selling is pretty graphs that management are convinced they need, any actual actionable insight they can give is secondary to that and I'd bet used but a small fraction of GA users.

iooi 7y ago

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 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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.
  - dragonsh 7y ago
    Try https://goaccess.io/ https://goaccess.io/ works very well for us with haproxy cluster and rsyslog for central logging for all web and api requests. We run goaccess in real-time mode processing 100000 requests per day with local ip to city database.
  - aldoushuxley001 7y ago
    I've always heard GoAccess recommended as the go-to solution for server side logging. Though I don't have personal experience with it, it does look amazing.
  - 7y ago

jedberg 7y ago

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...

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
adrianratnapala 7y ago
> ... 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.

oddevan 7y ago

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 7y ago
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 $20 per month for 30 websites. Kind of wish Netlify had gone with similar pricing
- dguo 7y ago
  I wish the pricing scaled with traffic instead of being a flat rate per site.
  - geraltofrivia 7y ago
    Yes! I have a static personal page, hosted via github pages, where I just want barebones information about how many people visit the page, from which country etc. I get maybe 10 visits per week. I probably won't pay 9$ for this. Currently using ticksel.com

segphault 7y ago

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.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
chasers 7y ago
I built Logflare for Cloudflare. A good example of what you’re talking about I think. https://logflare.app https://logflare.app
- vageli 7y ago
  > 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!).

HeavenFox 7y ago

"Sessions are tracked anonymously without cookies or personally identifying information like IP addresses." Very curious how they are able to do this

october_sky 7y ago
I would bet by fingerprinting the visitor's browser window: https://panopticlick.eff.org/ https://panopticlick.eff.org/
roskilli 7y ago
Might be using browser local storage APIs? Hah. I imagine you could also do some kind of web socket/long poll and try to fingerprint the connection a little so there’s high likelihood it’s the same session when it reconnects between page loads.
swyx 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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.
youngtaff 7y ago
It's possible to track using TLS session resumption techniques but who knows whether they're doing this

johnymontana 7y ago

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 7y ago
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.”

SanchoPanda 7y ago

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.

bfred_it 7y ago
This is the same exact comment I see on most HN posts about services. Probably most people’s time in maintenance and development is worth more than $9/month, that’s why these services exist. Semi-related xkcd https://xkcd.com/1319/ https://xkcd.com/1319/
- dc_gregory 7y ago
  No, its not. The OP has a different point to make, and its worth a re-read!
OrwellianChild 7y ago
> 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...

ryanworl 7y ago

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

miguelmota 7y ago

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.

bastawhiz 7y ago

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.

pcmaffey 7y ago

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

seanwilson 7y ago

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?

spondyl 7y ago

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.

mcjiggerlog 7y ago

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.

futhey 7y ago

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 7y ago
This, At least some screenshots or Demo. And it is only for 250,000 view / month.