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GoAccess is cool but it won't help you much if you have a static website or if you serve the majority of requests from a CDN. In those cases, Matomo (previously

GoAccess is cool but it won't help you much if you have a static website or if you serve the majority of requests from a CDN. In those cases, Matomo (previously piwik) is a good solution for client-side JS-based analytics similar to Google Analytics.

PenguinCoder 6y ago
How does Matomo work better with a static site, than GoAccess? GoAccess reads the server logs and creates metrics. Matomo requires javascript; that isn't 'static website'.
- Carpetsmoker 6y ago
  There are no server logs on GitHub pages, Netlify, etc. Analysing server logs also makes it harder to filter bots, and won't include some useful metrics like screen size.
- doh 6y ago
  GoAccess reads metrics of a server you have access to. So if you are distributing from a CDN or for instance GitHub or some other hosted solution, then you have no logs to read from. Also usage of javascript doesn't make one page non-static. Static is usually referred to a page that is rendered in full before a request comes in so the content does really change based on the request. More simply, content doesn't change dynamically based on the request. Having javascript to generate metrics doesn't make the page dynamic.
sradman 6y ago
I’m not familiar with GoAccess or Matomo but after some Googling it looks like Matomo requires self-hosting it’s PHP/MySQL server. If you are using a CDN then I’m assuming that multiple access.log files need to be aggregated at some point unless the CDN has a service that automates the process. Logstash and the full ELK Stack (or alternative) seem to be required when multiple heterogeneous servers are involved in serving content. Browser-side JavaScript analytics seems to avoid the DevOps surrounding the ELK Stack. GoAccess seems like a minimalist solution when you control a single httpd-style server and can run a local daemon to process the access.log file. As a side note, it looks like you need an Enterprise account to use Cloudflare’s Logpush Service or Logpull API. Amazon’s CloudFront has an advantage here. Avoiding Google Analytics is non-trivial for the lazy and/or price conscious.

PenguinCoder 6y ago

How does Matomo work better with a static site, than GoAccess? GoAccess reads the server logs and creates metrics. Matomo requires javascript; that isn't 'static website'.

Carpetsmoker 6y ago
There are no server logs on GitHub pages, Netlify, etc. Analysing server logs also makes it harder to filter bots, and won't include some useful metrics like screen size.
doh 6y ago
GoAccess reads metrics of a server you have access to. So if you are distributing from a CDN or for instance GitHub or some other hosted solution, then you have no logs to read from. Also usage of javascript doesn't make one page non-static. Static is usually referred to a page that is rendered in full before a request comes in so the content does really change based on the request. More simply, content doesn't change dynamically based on the request. Having javascript to generate metrics doesn't make the page dynamic.

sradman 6y ago

I’m not familiar with GoAccess or Matomo but after some Googling it looks like Matomo requires self-hosting it’s PHP/MySQL server. If you are using a CDN then I’m assuming that multiple access.log files need to be aggregated at some point unless the CDN has a service that automates the process. Logstash and the full ELK Stack (or alternative) seem to be required when multiple heterogeneous servers are involved in serving content. Browser-side JavaScript analytics seems to avoid the DevOps surrounding the ELK Stack. GoAccess seems like a minimalist solution when you control a single httpd-style server and can run a local daemon to process the access.log file. As a side note, it looks like you need an Enterprise account to use Cloudflare’s Logpush Service or Logpull API. Amazon’s CloudFront has an advantage here. Avoiding Google Analytics is non-trivial for the lazy and/or price conscious.