4 ms·

Keen IO builds your custom analytics infrastructure so you don’t have to

72 points by mwetzler 12y ago

bagels 12y ago
From their TOS: https://keen.io/tos https://keen.io/tos You grant us a... fully paid license to use the Content... for purposes of providing the Services... to other users of the Services They want a license to give my data away to other customers?
- dkador 12y ago
  (Disclaimer: founder of Keen IO here.) That's a bit misleading, I think. The full paragraph: You are solely responsible for any content and other material that you submit, publish, transmit, or display on, through, or with our Services (“Content”). You grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free and fully paid license to use the Content, as necessary, for purposes of providing the Services to you and other users of the Services. All rights in and to the Content not expressly granted to us in this Agreement are reserved by you. Anyways, legal mumbo jumbo aside (we obviously could make this clearer), we absolutely don't sell or give your data to anybody but you. That's one of the major differences between us and some other analytics companies. Your data is yours and we won't monetize it.
  - bagels 12y ago
    Thanks for the clarification. I wasn't trying to mislead anyone, I just wanted to know what license keen claims on the data we'd be providing.
    - dkador 12y ago
      Makes total sense. This is an important point for many of our customers so I appreciate you calling it out. Thanks!
  - josephlord 12y ago
    Does this mean that you don't sell or use aggregated data? Others TOS in this space often seem to permit that and it has put me off in the past. Will definitely consider keen.io on next project.
    - pnachbaur 12y ago
      We absolutely do not sell any data, and only use it internally to debug issues and optimize the system :)
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
gtaylor 12y ago
Can anyone who has used or is using these guys share some feedback on your experiences? Also, if anyone knows of any other services that allow you send event data like this for later querying/analysis, I'd love to hear about them. Keen IO seems to be exactly what we're looking for, conceptually.
- johns 12y ago
  We use it quite extensively and it's been great. The API is really well designed and hasn't limited us at all. Being able to send arbitrary event schemas is nice too. We were able to re-use an existing JSON document format with only minor changes which means we don't have to do a lot of mapping back and forth. I highly recommend them. (Disclosure: we partner with Keen IO on some product stuff, but we pay for our account for the analytics stuff just like anyone else.)
  - dkador 12y ago
    Thanks, John. Best part of this job is hearing from happy customers. :)
- Asparagirl 12y ago
  I use them for a side project (access logs and stats on an API I built) and they are great. Easy to set up, new features coming out every once in a while (some of them community-build hacks) and the one time they had an outage a while back they had a ridiculously detailed post-mortem. Also, I'm on the free plan, so really, can't beat that. :-)
- eli 12y ago
  On some level Mixpanel is a competitor. You can send it events and query/extract them later. Mixpanel is geared towards app/web analytics and marketing-type purposes. Mixpanel gives you some tools for building queries and reports and lets you export to Excel. Keen is geared towards developers. You can build charts that you can embed in other webpages (which is very cool) but building the queries kinda needs API access. If you're creating a custom analytics tool that integrates tightly with your system, Keen might be a better choice. Especially if you're going to e.g. let your customers view and analyze their own data (but not see anyone else's), Keen is a no brainer. It's got a better API and much better API security model. If you're looking for something more akin to a Google Analytics replacement but event-based instead of pageview-based, Mixpanel or similar might be better. Keen and Mixpanel both had great support, by the way. I'd encourage you to reach out to one or both if you're curious about how to integrate with it.
fomojola 12y ago
Excellent interface: the docs are a little opaque in places but all in all one of the best implementations I've worked with. Their use of scoped keys (https://keen.io/docs/security/ https://keen.io/docs/security/) to allow client-side data access is pretty awesome: very surprised that I haven't seen more usage of the technique in other data providers. The ability to provide client dashboards that directly access Keen's servers from within our web app without needing to proxy the data through us is simply awesome.
- mwetzler 12y ago
  Wow, thanks for the kind words! I'm blushing over here. I wrote a big portion of our docs and would love to know which parts could be fleshed out more (I can think of a few areas but I'm curious what you think).
  - fomojola 12y ago
    You're welcome: Keen's been great to work with. Mostly just organization: as far as I can tell you've recently started maintaining some of the docs at the Github repo, but much of the original writeups were on https://keen.io/docs/clients/javascript/reference/ https://keen.io/docs/clients/javascript/reference/. It makes it a little confusing jumping around and linking back and forth when you trying to figure out how to do a new thing. For my money (not much of it, but its what I have) Stripe's API doc reference (https://stripe.com/docs/api https://stripe.com/docs/api) which wraps both the concepts and the code samples into a nice little ball are still the gold standard.
    - mwetzler 12y ago
      Ah yes, we are in an awkward zone with some docs on our site in Sphinx and others on Github. We love that developers can PR our docs on Github, and we agree that Stripe's docs are the BEST. At some point we will tackle a doc revamp that puts us in that direction. The personalized code samples & easy library switching features of Stripe docs are a dream.
- gtaylor 12y ago

72 points by mwetzler 12y ago

From their TOS: https://keen.io/tos https://keen.io/tos You grant us a... fully paid license to use the Content... for purposes of providing the Services... to other users of the Services They want a license to give my data away to other customers?

dkador 12y ago
(Disclaimer: founder of Keen IO here.) That's a bit misleading, I think. The full paragraph: You are solely responsible for any content and other material that you submit, publish, transmit, or display on, through, or with our Services (“Content”). You grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free and fully paid license to use the Content, as necessary, for purposes of providing the Services to you and other users of the Services. All rights in and to the Content not expressly granted to us in this Agreement are reserved by you. Anyways, legal mumbo jumbo aside (we obviously could make this clearer), we absolutely don't sell or give your data to anybody but you. That's one of the major differences between us and some other analytics companies. Your data is yours and we won't monetize it.
- bagels 12y ago
  Thanks for the clarification. I wasn't trying to mislead anyone, I just wanted to know what license keen claims on the data we'd be providing.
  - dkador 12y ago
    Makes total sense. This is an important point for many of our customers so I appreciate you calling it out. Thanks!
- josephlord 12y ago
  Does this mean that you don't sell or use aggregated data? Others TOS in this space often seem to permit that and it has put me off in the past. Will definitely consider keen.io on next project.
  - pnachbaur 12y ago
    We absolutely do not sell any data, and only use it internally to debug issues and optimize the system :)
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

gtaylor 12y ago

Can anyone who has used or is using these guys share some feedback on your experiences? Also, if anyone knows of any other services that allow you send event data like this for later querying/analysis, I'd love to hear about them. Keen IO seems to be exactly what we're looking for, conceptually.

johns 12y ago
We use it quite extensively and it's been great. The API is really well designed and hasn't limited us at all. Being able to send arbitrary event schemas is nice too. We were able to re-use an existing JSON document format with only minor changes which means we don't have to do a lot of mapping back and forth. I highly recommend them. (Disclosure: we partner with Keen IO on some product stuff, but we pay for our account for the analytics stuff just like anyone else.)
- dkador 12y ago
  Thanks, John. Best part of this job is hearing from happy customers. :)
Asparagirl 12y ago
I use them for a side project (access logs and stats on an API I built) and they are great. Easy to set up, new features coming out every once in a while (some of them community-build hacks) and the one time they had an outage a while back they had a ridiculously detailed post-mortem. Also, I'm on the free plan, so really, can't beat that. :-)
eli 12y ago
On some level Mixpanel is a competitor. You can send it events and query/extract them later. Mixpanel is geared towards app/web analytics and marketing-type purposes. Mixpanel gives you some tools for building queries and reports and lets you export to Excel. Keen is geared towards developers. You can build charts that you can embed in other webpages (which is very cool) but building the queries kinda needs API access. If you're creating a custom analytics tool that integrates tightly with your system, Keen might be a better choice. Especially if you're going to e.g. let your customers view and analyze their own data (but not see anyone else's), Keen is a no brainer. It's got a better API and much better API security model. If you're looking for something more akin to a Google Analytics replacement but event-based instead of pageview-based, Mixpanel or similar might be better. Keen and Mixpanel both had great support, by the way. I'd encourage you to reach out to one or both if you're curious about how to integrate with it.

fomojola 12y ago

Excellent interface: the docs are a little opaque in places but all in all one of the best implementations I've worked with. Their use of scoped keys (https://keen.io/docs/security/ https://keen.io/docs/security/) to allow client-side data access is pretty awesome: very surprised that I haven't seen more usage of the technique in other data providers. The ability to provide client dashboards that directly access Keen's servers from within our web app without needing to proxy the data through us is simply awesome.

mwetzler 12y ago
Wow, thanks for the kind words! I'm blushing over here. I wrote a big portion of our docs and would love to know which parts could be fleshed out more (I can think of a few areas but I'm curious what you think).
- fomojola 12y ago
  You're welcome: Keen's been great to work with. Mostly just organization: as far as I can tell you've recently started maintaining some of the docs at the Github repo, but much of the original writeups were on https://keen.io/docs/clients/javascript/reference/ https://keen.io/docs/clients/javascript/reference/. It makes it a little confusing jumping around and linking back and forth when you trying to figure out how to do a new thing. For my money (not much of it, but its what I have) Stripe's API doc reference (https://stripe.com/docs/api https://stripe.com/docs/api) which wraps both the concepts and the code samples into a nice little ball are still the gold standard.
  - mwetzler 12y ago
    Ah yes, we are in an awkward zone with some docs on our site in Sphinx and others on Github. We love that developers can PR our docs on Github, and we agree that Stripe's docs are the BEST. At some point we will tackle a doc revamp that puts us in that direction. The personalized code samples & easy library switching features of Stripe docs are a dream.
gtaylor 12y ago