We use it on our site, which handles around 100M requests per month, works really nice. In fact, we have a screen in the office that continuously displays the stats, quite nifty!
I believe JS analytics tools serve marketing well, providing estimates like who's purchasing my product or how many are reading my article.
However, for devops, relying too much on these tools can be a trap, potentially causing security and server issues without immediate detection. Our team opts for goaccess for this reason. We prioritize accurate data from logs and scrutinize traffic patterns, focusing beyond just distinguishing between human and bot counts, a task we leave to the marketing/product department.
I think many developers overlook this aspect. If you're not in marketing, it's not just about tallying human visitors on our sites. It's essential to be vigilant against possible daily attacks and avoid excessive reliance on basic JS analytics.
Even for personal websites, relying solely on JS can compromise security. We require precise data, and logs prove more dependable than JS, especially with the increasing number of tools tampering with JS data.
We should steer clear of the trap of exclusively focusing on the count of human visitors.
JS analytics are increasingly susceptible to inaccuracies as data manipulation methods multiply, leading to the production of unreliable events from JavaScript endpoints. Staying abreast of industry developments highlights a rising trend of blockers leveraging AI-driven detection, reducing the significance of JavaScript analytics in such situations.
While JS analytics may suit the needs of marketing professionals concerned with product sales and article visibility, those focused on precise traffic patterns, like daily devops, find GoAccess to be a more effective tool.
JS analytics face an escalating risk of inaccuracies due to the myriad ways data can be manipulated, resulting in the generation of unreliable events from JavaScript endpoints. Keeping up with the industry reveals an emerging trend of blockers using AI-driven detection, diminishing the relevance of JavaScript analytics in such scenarios.
I would contend the contrary. Our company consistently runs GoAccess because we are primarily concerned with unusual traffic patterns. This involves monitoring for potential attacks or abnormal bot traffic that might impact our servers, etc.
While JS analytics tools might be of more interest to the marketing team, they are not as crucial for the devops team.
If accuracy refers solely to human-vs-bot detection, there might be a point, but for comprehensive traffic analysis, access logs are unparalleled in accuracy.
JavaScript analytics are increasingly prone to inaccuracies due to numerous methods available for manipulating data, leading to the generation of inaccurate events from JavaScript endpoints. Staying current in the field reveals a growing trend of blockers employing AI-driven detection, rendering JavaScript analytics less relevant in these cases.
I think it depends a lot in what you are after. Accurate results through the logs, including bots.
Or inaccurate results via JS. Bunch of services folks are using out there that blocks them.
Tracking visitors at the client level deflates the actual number of visitors. On the other hand, server-side tracking provides a more accurate number with the tradeoff of not knowing for sure if the client is a human behind a browser.
We use goaccess against a pretty busy centralized log server and has worked really well for years. We don't have to worry about JS and that's always a plus. I personally like how it follows the unix philosophy.
For us it was literately an `apt install goaccess`, picked the COMBINED log format and it's been running for over a month in prod without issues (rotating weekly).