13 ms·

Cloudflare Analytics review

163 points by markosaric 6y ago

maltelandwehr 6y ago
I stopped reading when the author put “unique visitors” from one tool next to “visits” from the other tool. Those are two completely different metrics that you cannot compare!
- marvinblum 6y ago
  Agreed, but I think Plausible differentiates between sessions and visitors? The term should be sessions: non-unique visits across a defined time range. At least that is what I do with Pirsch [0] and on my website [1]. [0] https://pirsch.io/ https://pirsch.io/ [1] https://marvinblum.de/tracking https://marvinblum.de/tracking
  - ukutaht 6y ago
    Plausible developer here. We don't show the number sessions/visits at the moment. Most seem happy with the 'unique visitors' number and we don't want to add extra data to the UI unless it's truly useful.
    - marvinblum 6y ago
      Yeah I see that on my personal website. Most visitors won't come back later at the same day, so sessions and unique visitors is almost the same.
    - oauea 6y ago
      Gotta love it when analytics platforms don't give analysts access to all the data.
      - OJFord 6y ago
        If you read the site, especially the comparison to Matomo, it makes clear that the emphasis is on ease of use, stripped down, clean UX, not the whole kitchen sink. If you want that, I suppose GA or Matomo are for you? Has to be something to differentiate them, pointless to expect or want them all to be the same.
marvinblum 6y ago
I'm working on an open-source analytics lib [0] and I fully agree with the article that Cloudflare should either do it right, or not do it at all. Filtering bots is probably the hardest part and time consuming. There is no simple approach to solve the issue, but not doing it at all makes it worthless, especially for the price. Hopefully their push will make the issue more prominent to website owners and help Google Analytics alternatives to grow. [0] https://github.com/pirsch-analytics/pirsch https://github.com/pirsch-analytics/pirsch
robinoh 6y ago
Cloudflare Analytics is not there yet then. I guess it currently resembles more like their standard analytics overview page, which currently rather looks like a summary of a server access log. I actually use Clicky and self hosted Matomo for most of my properties. I would love to use something like Plausible but to me (SEO pro) the most important feat is lacking: landing pages and average amount of actions and/or time spend per visitor per landing page.
- ukutaht 6y ago
  We'll be adding entry/landing pages report soon :)
kgc 6y ago
If they just split out the human traffic it would be way more useful.
polote 6y ago
Two HN marketing powered companies fighting against each other. Cloudflare Analytics is server side, we all know that server side analytics is good to get number of GET requests but is almost unusable for anything else. But in their case it seems they are not even trying to filter bots Page views is always the biggest complains people have when they change analytics tool, "why you have 100k more/less pages views than GA, adobe Analytics?" -> "We don't count pageviews the same way" The reality is everyone is filtering bots a different way and nobody is really doing it well, as a result anyone numbers are wrong. The raw number of pageviews usually doesn't mean anything, that's better to look at difference
- youngtaff 6y ago
  It's not just that they don't count page views the same way… There's a 'dead-zone' between the page loading and the analytics script executing, any visitor who leaves during this period won't be counted. When there's more than one analytics script one will execute before the other so there are abound to be mismatches
  - bladegash 6y ago
    In addition to that, it took me a while to figure out that bounce rate, page views, and duration aren't calculated very well (if at all) if the user only goes to one page, then leaves. Finally figured out that setting up Google tag manager to trigger updates to GA on scroll not only gives you insight as to whether the content is being read (and to what extent), but also forces updates of pageviews/duration and even bounce rate as well (I am guessing due to a single page visit not being considered a bounce if they spend a certain amount of time on the page?).
    - cosmie 6y ago
      It's not time based; it's how you configure the events to send. GA events have an optional field called "non-interaction", which defaults to false if not present[1]. Pageviews are considered interactive hits. GA's technical definition of a bounce is any visit with only a single interactive hit, leading to the layman definition of bounce rate being "people who viewed two or more pages". Events though, are also interactive events by default (non-interaction = false being a double negative). So the moment you implement event tracking, if you don't explicitly control that parameter, the definition of "bounce rate" expands to include "the number of people that triggered my event tracking" and your bounce rate will become next to worthless the more liberal or trigger happy your event tracking becomes. A general rule of thumb is to make "passive" event tracking non-interactive, so that it doesn't impact bounce rate. Things like scroll tracking, timers, etc. Those are all all subject to passive behaviors such as background-ed tabs, impulse scrolling when you first get to a site, etc. And not necessarily representative of active engagement with your site/content. Then make "active" event tracking (such as clicks tracking on interactive elements or outbound links) interactive. That way bounce rate becomes more representative of active engagement from users. Then optionally, and deliberately, make certain passive tracking events interactive for the express purpose of impacting/influencing bounce rate. For example, a website with lots of long form content but few interactive elements may want to make their passive "30 second" timer event an interactive event, based on business logic that someone spending 30 seconds on an article is considered engaged with it and, having hit that threshold of passive engagement with the page, should. no longer be considered a bounced visit. But every other timer would be set to non-interactive, and scroll tracking would be set to non-interactive (so you don't get false positives from people that scroll all the way to the bottom immediately). Sending non-interactive events continues to increment the duration, so you still get that value from sending the non-interactive events. But without it skewing your bounce metric. That said, you rarely see that much care (or understanding) put into it in practice. Familiarity with how implementation impacts interpretation tends to be relatively rare, and a "bad" implementation leads to juiced metrics. So few analytics/marketing teams are even aware they can actively define business rules around what is a bounced visit and what isn't, so most don't and take whatever the system spits out as gospel, implicitly leaving it as "undefined behavior" subject to the whims of however it's implemented. And even if you educate those teams on such things, no one wants to eat the hit to their vanity metrics that result from truing up an existing implementation that has such issues. So even broaching the subject tends to just lead to consternation and continuation of the status quo[2]. [1] https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033068#NonInteractionEvents https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033068#NonInter... [2] The bitter grumblings of someone that pokes this hornets nest on a frequent basis, and potentially a skewed perspective rather than objective fact.
nickjj 6y ago
Thanks for the write up. If anyone is curious, that howtotomakemyblog.com referral site in the CF dashboard seems to be a domain that redirects back to the same domain that's hosting this blog post. It didn't appear in his analytics tool's referrals. I guess it's because his tool follows redirects and ignores listing same site referrals while CF does not?
amadeuspagel 6y ago
> I could talk about free never being free or the venture-funded model that allows them to lose hundreds of millions of dollars every year centralizing a big part of the internet but all that is a different conversation. Cloudflare is a profitable public company.
- reducesuffering 6y ago
  It has the potential to be profitable, but it is not currently.[0] [0]https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/NET/financials?p=NET https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/NET/financials?p=NET
  - amadeuspagel 6y ago
    TIL that gross profit is not the same as net income.
    - 02020202 6y ago
      their TTM FCF is -108M$. please stop being stupid in public places.
- polote 6y ago
  You can be profitable in some areas and still fund at loss other parts of your business
  - amadeuspagel 6y ago
    But that's not what cloudflare is doing. You can't separate analytics from other parts of its business. Cloudflare collects a lot of data to determine which traffic is legitimate, and offering analytics simply means that they build a nice UI for site owners to access that data.
tpetry 6y ago
The results of cloudflare analytics look like the old awstats results: You know instantly that something is wrong because the numbers are much too high. Interestingly that was the exact reason why Google Analytics got big as they had basically no bots in their statistics (in the old days running js was so complex no crawler or bot did it). And now we‘ve done a 360 degree turn and be in the same position with inflated server logs. Is there any good analytics solution which is only server side? Getting some good statistics but not exposing to visitors they are tracked (even in a friendly mode) would be nice.
- foolmeonce 6y ago
  I'm not sure it is bots, I think it is just the difficulty in counting hits vs page views and page views within a "session" which has no meaning whatsoever on the web..
- acdha 6y ago
  Those numbers are definitely high - and the “unknown” section suggests a lot of that is bot activity but I would be careful about assuming GA is accurate rather than low. I’ve seen it falling off for years as tracker blocking became common and then default, and even before then the need to load a short TTL script meant that a measurable fraction of users wouldn’t be captured.
- pickledish 6y ago
  Also interested in any CDN that has decent server-side analytics. It seems like it wouldn't be hard to at least make an attempt to exclude bot requests from the results -- filtering out the main AWS-owned (and other cloud providers) CIDRs alone would go a long way I'm sure
  - marvinblum 6y ago
    Most cloud providers provide access to an CIDR list.
  - iaml 6y ago
    I love how people on hn recommend using a private vpn with algo deployed on aws/digitalocean and then other people recommend straight-up discarding all of them as bots. I know those are different people, but kind of frustrated people are so trigger happy to ban hosters/tor.
kall 6y ago
If anyone can distinguish bot visitors from real visitors server side it should be Cloudflare. Don‘t they sell that capability as a service?
- brightball 6y ago
  That was my first thought on reading it as well.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
brunoluiz 6y ago
> Cloudflare should be serious about this or they’ll only help Google Analytics in its dominance > The main danger I see after paying for and trying Cloudflare Analytics is that they may not believe in this at all. This is so true! Hopefully, the issues mentioned in the post will be fixed soon, considering this is a quite new product. I can see high value for small personal websites, as they would be able to get something for free and focus on user privacy. Meanwhile, the mentioned issues might be quite beneficial for other companies, such as Plausible or Fathom. They are quite mature on the privacy-focused analytics market, and offer things that Cloudflare analytics doesn't. People might start on Cloudflare Analytics (free) and eventually migrate to something more full-featured.
- vishnumohandas 6y ago
  >> Cloudflare should be serious about this or they’ll only help Google Analytics in its dominance >> The main danger I see after paying for and trying Cloudflare Analytics is that they may not believe in this at all. I disagree with this part of the post because developers who opted for Cloudflare Analytics simply because it was "privacy first" are likely to explore other alternatives before selling their souls to GA.
mikece 6y ago
"In my Cloudflare Analytics versus Plausible Analytics comparison, Cloudflare Analytics is inaccurate to the point that the data is pretty much useless as web analytics... Seems for now that the brand new Cloudflare Analytics is simply a server log tool with server log accuracy." Okay, this is nice to distinguish but I would kinda like to know both numbers: what's the raw load coming through CF to my website and what are the "real human users" -- and what tools can CF provide to block the former while allowing the latter? If CF can provide easy to configure and understand WAF rules to filter more of the bots and other raw traffic that I don't want then I'm going to save on my AWS/Azure/hosting bill.
syrrim 6y ago
>15:11:37 ||plausible.io^$3p -- markosaric.com 3 script https://custom.plausible.io/ https://custom.plausible.io/ >Google Analytics has a big issue with adblockers and on this site alone more than 25% of visitors block it. >Plausible avoid it by not collecting any personal data in the first place. Seems like this is wrong. The default filters on ublock seem to block plausible's script just as much as google's. Could likely be argued that the greater ability to filter out bots with a script makes it preferable as compared to server-side analytics. But you are definitely under-counting legitimate visitors if you go that route.
drcongo 6y ago
I'm really enjoying this series of blog posts from @markosaric - on some sites I work with we've been really struggling to understand the differences in visitor counts from various analytics solutions, and some of those sites depend on those numbers for funding. I was quite excited when CloudFlare announced an analytics product as really they should know better than anything else we can install and run, exactly how much human traffic is hitting our URLs. But what we got seems to be almost useless.
LordAtlas 6y ago
Not showing stats beyond 7 days is the biggest WTF for me. Makes CF completely useless.
t0mmyb0y 6y ago
"Like I told them on the call, as long as they don’t go evil" Too late. How many racist sites get their service for free?
jplevine 6y ago
Hi, I'm the product manager for Cloudflare Analytics. Thanks for this thorough and thoughtful review. We are totally serious about building a world-class, privacy-first, free analytics product. At risk of HN cliche, this is our "early work". We are actively working to fix many of the rough edges mentioned here; if we had waited to fix all of them before shipping, we never would have shipped! For folks who haven't seen it, I suggest checking out our launch blog post[0] which gives some more context around edge vs browser analytics (spoiler: we do both!), why we count visits the way we do, and how we handle bot traffic. We know we have work to do on the "jagged lines" problem. For some low-traffic websites, we might show noisier, low-resolution data than is ideal. (We've artificially constrained our analytics to query a maximum of 7 days at a time because this problem is exacerbated with longer time ranges.) My colleague Jamie wrote a nice blog post about how and why we sample data [1]. In short: we have an existing customer base of 25 million+ Internet priorities, whose traffic volume spans 9 orders of magnitude! Sampling data is an elegant approach that allows us to serve fast, flexible analytics for all our customers. Sampling shouldn't be feared, but we know we can do better in some cases. We've recently merged some deep-in-the-weeds improvements to ClickHouse [2] that should result in improved resolution. And we're currently working to store full-resolution data for the smallest websites. Happy to address any other specific points that folks have questions about. [0] https://blog.cloudflare.com/free-privacy-first-analytics-for-a-better-web/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/free-privacy-first-analytics-for... [1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/explaining-cloudflares-abr-analytics/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/explaining-cloudflares-abr-analy... [2] https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/pull/14221 https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/pull/14221
- polote 6y ago
  > Sampling shouldn't be feared Well I would say the opposite, sampling should absolutely be feared. In a lot of case sampling is not an issue, home page, or popular page but in others, including checkout pages, , product pages, and low visibility pages, sampling can make massive difference. When working with sampled data you should always keep it in mind
  - sfeng 6y ago
partiallypro 6y ago
I hope this doesn't turn into what their domain service became...which feels like a complete after thought. I was excited about it at first but it's been a year now and it feels the same as day 1. Incomplete and abandoned.

163 points by markosaric 6y ago

I stopped reading when the author put “unique visitors” from one tool next to “visits” from the other tool. Those are two completely different metrics that you cannot compare!

marvinblum 6y ago
Agreed, but I think Plausible differentiates between sessions and visitors? The term should be sessions: non-unique visits across a defined time range. At least that is what I do with Pirsch [0] and on my website [1]. [0] https://pirsch.io/ https://pirsch.io/ [1] https://marvinblum.de/tracking https://marvinblum.de/tracking
- ukutaht 6y ago
  Plausible developer here. We don't show the number sessions/visits at the moment. Most seem happy with the 'unique visitors' number and we don't want to add extra data to the UI unless it's truly useful.
  - marvinblum 6y ago
    Yeah I see that on my personal website. Most visitors won't come back later at the same day, so sessions and unique visitors is almost the same.
  - oauea 6y ago
    Gotta love it when analytics platforms don't give analysts access to all the data.
    - OJFord 6y ago
      If you read the site, especially the comparison to Matomo, it makes clear that the emphasis is on ease of use, stripped down, clean UX, not the whole kitchen sink. If you want that, I suppose GA or Matomo are for you? Has to be something to differentiate them, pointless to expect or want them all to be the same.

marvinblum 6y ago

I'm working on an open-source analytics lib [0] and I fully agree with the article that Cloudflare should either do it right, or not do it at all. Filtering bots is probably the hardest part and time consuming. There is no simple approach to solve the issue, but not doing it at all makes it worthless, especially for the price. Hopefully their push will make the issue more prominent to website owners and help Google Analytics alternatives to grow. [0] https://github.com/pirsch-analytics/pirsch https://github.com/pirsch-analytics/pirsch

robinoh 6y ago

Cloudflare Analytics is not there yet then. I guess it currently resembles more like their standard analytics overview page, which currently rather looks like a summary of a server access log. I actually use Clicky and self hosted Matomo for most of my properties. I would love to use something like Plausible but to me (SEO pro) the most important feat is lacking: landing pages and average amount of actions and/or time spend per visitor per landing page.

ukutaht 6y ago
We'll be adding entry/landing pages report soon :)

kgc 6y ago

If they just split out the human traffic it would be way more useful.

polote 6y ago

Two HN marketing powered companies fighting against each other. Cloudflare Analytics is server side, we all know that server side analytics is good to get number of GET requests but is almost unusable for anything else. But in their case it seems they are not even trying to filter bots Page views is always the biggest complains people have when they change analytics tool, "why you have 100k more/less pages views than GA, adobe Analytics?" -> "We don't count pageviews the same way" The reality is everyone is filtering bots a different way and nobody is really doing it well, as a result anyone numbers are wrong. The raw number of pageviews usually doesn't mean anything, that's better to look at difference

youngtaff 6y ago
It's not just that they don't count page views the same way… There's a 'dead-zone' between the page loading and the analytics script executing, any visitor who leaves during this period won't be counted. When there's more than one analytics script one will execute before the other so there are abound to be mismatches
- bladegash 6y ago
  In addition to that, it took me a while to figure out that bounce rate, page views, and duration aren't calculated very well (if at all) if the user only goes to one page, then leaves. Finally figured out that setting up Google tag manager to trigger updates to GA on scroll not only gives you insight as to whether the content is being read (and to what extent), but also forces updates of pageviews/duration and even bounce rate as well (I am guessing due to a single page visit not being considered a bounce if they spend a certain amount of time on the page?).
  - cosmie 6y ago
    It's not time based; it's how you configure the events to send. GA events have an optional field called "non-interaction", which defaults to false if not present[1]. Pageviews are considered interactive hits. GA's technical definition of a bounce is any visit with only a single interactive hit, leading to the layman definition of bounce rate being "people who viewed two or more pages". Events though, are also interactive events by default (non-interaction = false being a double negative). So the moment you implement event tracking, if you don't explicitly control that parameter, the definition of "bounce rate" expands to include "the number of people that triggered my event tracking" and your bounce rate will become next to worthless the more liberal or trigger happy your event tracking becomes. A general rule of thumb is to make "passive" event tracking non-interactive, so that it doesn't impact bounce rate. Things like scroll tracking, timers, etc. Those are all all subject to passive behaviors such as background-ed tabs, impulse scrolling when you first get to a site, etc. And not necessarily representative of active engagement with your site/content. Then make "active" event tracking (such as clicks tracking on interactive elements or outbound links) interactive. That way bounce rate becomes more representative of active engagement from users. Then optionally, and deliberately, make certain passive tracking events interactive for the express purpose of impacting/influencing bounce rate. For example, a website with lots of long form content but few interactive elements may want to make their passive "30 second" timer event an interactive event, based on business logic that someone spending 30 seconds on an article is considered engaged with it and, having hit that threshold of passive engagement with the page, should. no longer be considered a bounced visit. But every other timer would be set to non-interactive, and scroll tracking would be set to non-interactive (so you don't get false positives from people that scroll all the way to the bottom immediately). Sending non-interactive events continues to increment the duration, so you still get that value from sending the non-interactive events. But without it skewing your bounce metric. That said, you rarely see that much care (or understanding) put into it in practice. Familiarity with how implementation impacts interpretation tends to be relatively rare, and a "bad" implementation leads to juiced metrics. So few analytics/marketing teams are even aware they can actively define business rules around what is a bounced visit and what isn't, so most don't and take whatever the system spits out as gospel, implicitly leaving it as "undefined behavior" subject to the whims of however it's implemented. And even if you educate those teams on such things, no one wants to eat the hit to their vanity metrics that result from truing up an existing implementation that has such issues. So even broaching the subject tends to just lead to consternation and continuation of the status quo[2]. [1] https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033068#NonInteractionEvents https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033068#NonInter... [2] The bitter grumblings of someone that pokes this hornets nest on a frequent basis, and potentially a skewed perspective rather than objective fact.

nickjj 6y ago

Thanks for the write up. If anyone is curious, that howtotomakemyblog.com referral site in the CF dashboard seems to be a domain that redirects back to the same domain that's hosting this blog post. It didn't appear in his analytics tool's referrals. I guess it's because his tool follows redirects and ignores listing same site referrals while CF does not?

amadeuspagel 6y ago

> I could talk about free never being free or the venture-funded model that allows them to lose hundreds of millions of dollars every year centralizing a big part of the internet but all that is a different conversation. Cloudflare is a profitable public company.

reducesuffering 6y ago
It has the potential to be profitable, but it is not currently.[0] [0]https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/NET/financials?p=NET https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/NET/financials?p=NET
- amadeuspagel 6y ago
  TIL that gross profit is not the same as net income.
  - 02020202 6y ago
    their TTM FCF is -108M$. please stop being stupid in public places.
polote 6y ago
You can be profitable in some areas and still fund at loss other parts of your business
- amadeuspagel 6y ago
  But that's not what cloudflare is doing. You can't separate analytics from other parts of its business. Cloudflare collects a lot of data to determine which traffic is legitimate, and offering analytics simply means that they build a nice UI for site owners to access that data.

tpetry 6y ago

The results of cloudflare analytics look like the old awstats results: You know instantly that something is wrong because the numbers are much too high. Interestingly that was the exact reason why Google Analytics got big as they had basically no bots in their statistics (in the old days running js was so complex no crawler or bot did it). And now we‘ve done a 360 degree turn and be in the same position with inflated server logs. Is there any good analytics solution which is only server side? Getting some good statistics but not exposing to visitors they are tracked (even in a friendly mode) would be nice.

foolmeonce 6y ago
I'm not sure it is bots, I think it is just the difficulty in counting hits vs page views and page views within a "session" which has no meaning whatsoever on the web..
acdha 6y ago
Those numbers are definitely high - and the “unknown” section suggests a lot of that is bot activity but I would be careful about assuming GA is accurate rather than low. I’ve seen it falling off for years as tracker blocking became common and then default, and even before then the need to load a short TTL script meant that a measurable fraction of users wouldn’t be captured.
pickledish 6y ago
Also interested in any CDN that has decent server-side analytics. It seems like it wouldn't be hard to at least make an attempt to exclude bot requests from the results -- filtering out the main AWS-owned (and other cloud providers) CIDRs alone would go a long way I'm sure
- marvinblum 6y ago
  Most cloud providers provide access to an CIDR list.
- iaml 6y ago
  I love how people on hn recommend using a private vpn with algo deployed on aws/digitalocean and then other people recommend straight-up discarding all of them as bots. I know those are different people, but kind of frustrated people are so trigger happy to ban hosters/tor.

kall 6y ago

If anyone can distinguish bot visitors from real visitors server side it should be Cloudflare. Don‘t they sell that capability as a service?

brightball 6y ago
That was my first thought on reading it as well.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

brunoluiz 6y ago

> Cloudflare should be serious about this or they’ll only help Google Analytics in its dominance > The main danger I see after paying for and trying Cloudflare Analytics is that they may not believe in this at all. This is so true! Hopefully, the issues mentioned in the post will be fixed soon, considering this is a quite new product. I can see high value for small personal websites, as they would be able to get something for free and focus on user privacy. Meanwhile, the mentioned issues might be quite beneficial for other companies, such as Plausible or Fathom. They are quite mature on the privacy-focused analytics market, and offer things that Cloudflare analytics doesn't. People might start on Cloudflare Analytics (free) and eventually migrate to something more full-featured.

vishnumohandas 6y ago
>> Cloudflare should be serious about this or they’ll only help Google Analytics in its dominance >> The main danger I see after paying for and trying Cloudflare Analytics is that they may not believe in this at all. I disagree with this part of the post because developers who opted for Cloudflare Analytics simply because it was "privacy first" are likely to explore other alternatives before selling their souls to GA.

mikece 6y ago

"In my Cloudflare Analytics versus Plausible Analytics comparison, Cloudflare Analytics is inaccurate to the point that the data is pretty much useless as web analytics... Seems for now that the brand new Cloudflare Analytics is simply a server log tool with server log accuracy." Okay, this is nice to distinguish but I would kinda like to know both numbers: what's the raw load coming through CF to my website and what are the "real human users" -- and what tools can CF provide to block the former while allowing the latter? If CF can provide easy to configure and understand WAF rules to filter more of the bots and other raw traffic that I don't want then I'm going to save on my AWS/Azure/hosting bill.

syrrim 6y ago

>15:11:37 ||plausible.io^$3p -- markosaric.com 3 script https://custom.plausible.io/ https://custom.plausible.io/ >Google Analytics has a big issue with adblockers and on this site alone more than 25% of visitors block it. >Plausible avoid it by not collecting any personal data in the first place. Seems like this is wrong. The default filters on ublock seem to block plausible's script just as much as google's. Could likely be argued that the greater ability to filter out bots with a script makes it preferable as compared to server-side analytics. But you are definitely under-counting legitimate visitors if you go that route.

drcongo 6y ago

I'm really enjoying this series of blog posts from @markosaric - on some sites I work with we've been really struggling to understand the differences in visitor counts from various analytics solutions, and some of those sites depend on those numbers for funding. I was quite excited when CloudFlare announced an analytics product as really they should know better than anything else we can install and run, exactly how much human traffic is hitting our URLs. But what we got seems to be almost useless.

LordAtlas 6y ago

Not showing stats beyond 7 days is the biggest WTF for me. Makes CF completely useless.

t0mmyb0y 6y ago

"Like I told them on the call, as long as they don’t go evil" Too late. How many racist sites get their service for free?

jplevine 6y ago

Hi, I'm the product manager for Cloudflare Analytics. Thanks for this thorough and thoughtful review. We are totally serious about building a world-class, privacy-first, free analytics product. At risk of HN cliche, this is our "early work". We are actively working to fix many of the rough edges mentioned here; if we had waited to fix all of them before shipping, we never would have shipped! For folks who haven't seen it, I suggest checking out our launch blog post[0] which gives some more context around edge vs browser analytics (spoiler: we do both!), why we count visits the way we do, and how we handle bot traffic. We know we have work to do on the "jagged lines" problem. For some low-traffic websites, we might show noisier, low-resolution data than is ideal. (We've artificially constrained our analytics to query a maximum of 7 days at a time because this problem is exacerbated with longer time ranges.) My colleague Jamie wrote a nice blog post about how and why we sample data [1]. In short: we have an existing customer base of 25 million+ Internet priorities, whose traffic volume spans 9 orders of magnitude! Sampling data is an elegant approach that allows us to serve fast, flexible analytics for all our customers. Sampling shouldn't be feared, but we know we can do better in some cases. We've recently merged some deep-in-the-weeds improvements to ClickHouse [2] that should result in improved resolution. And we're currently working to store full-resolution data for the smallest websites. Happy to address any other specific points that folks have questions about. [0] https://blog.cloudflare.com/free-privacy-first-analytics-for-a-better-web/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/free-privacy-first-analytics-for... [1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/explaining-cloudflares-abr-analytics/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/explaining-cloudflares-abr-analy... [2] https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/pull/14221 https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/pull/14221

polote 6y ago
> Sampling shouldn't be feared Well I would say the opposite, sampling should absolutely be feared. In a lot of case sampling is not an issue, home page, or popular page but in others, including checkout pages, , product pages, and low visibility pages, sampling can make massive difference. When working with sampled data you should always keep it in mind
- sfeng 6y ago

partiallypro 6y ago

I hope this doesn't turn into what their domain service became...which feels like a complete after thought. I was excited about it at first but it's been a year now and it feels the same as day 1. Incomplete and abandoned.