Great article! Your dashboard is not ugly, it's special :)<p>I also broke up from Google Analytics, but I didn't sacrifice the insights, I even gained more. I created a self-hosted analytics[0] platform to replace Google Analytics which is not as complex, but powerful enough to give you all the data the you need. I also had the fear of missing out if I removed GA, but I realized that I only use a small subset of the data they store, and after implementing those in my dashboard I no longer found the need to check out GA. Today I rely solely on userTrack and removed all Google 3rd party includes from my site (just yesterday I uploaded the Google fonts files to my server, so I no longer include them from Google's domain). Another surprising benefit is that my dashboard loads a lot faster that the GA dashboard.<p>[0]: <a href="https://www.usertrack.net/" rel="nofollow">https://www.usertrack.net/</a>
Ironically I decided to ditch analytics largely because I wanted a faster site. Google's PageSpeed Insights page shows my site gets 100/100 on mobile/desktop, which was not the case when I had analytics available.<p>Of course such measurements are meaningless, but I had already come to the conclusion that I was adding analytics snippets to my sites as a cargo-cult thing; I never actually viewed the stats, and when I wanted to get a quick feel of the level of traffic I was receiving I'd just tail the server-log.<p>These days with CDNs, caches, and similar, I don't really have a single specific server-log to look at. But if the site is up I know if it became unexpectedly popular, because it was featured somewhere, when I get spontaneous emails from strangers..
There are open source analytics tools, Matomo is one of them:<p><a href="https://matomo.org/" rel="nofollow">https://matomo.org/</a>
I am building a web analytics platform that in theory could be a decent substitute for GA. I'd like to share some notes with you.<p>In addition to all you have mentioned, GA has a problem now called adblockers.
It's actually not a problem for them as much as it is for website owners. Depending on the country, independent agencies say adblockers are present in more than 30% of browsers. I can't imagine what kind of business intelligence tool provides that amount of error and is still considered ok.
Does anyone know what is wrong with HN timestamps? I saw that there was a lot of traffic to that article in the last few hours (using my own analytics service of course), and the article is back on the HN homepage with a timestamp that says 4 hours ago, but I posted it yesterday. Comments from below also have incorrect timestamps.
I guess the next step is to dump analytics completely and save your dopamine for the things that matter. It’s one thing if you’re a large organisation making iterative changes to a service based on usage data from analytics, but what changes are you going to make to your blogging based on your analytics?
Been using Netlify's (server-log-based) analytics offering with my site. It feels maybe a little expensive for what it is, and definitely doesn't have many bells/whistles, but it's been a good-enough alternative.
Thanks for writing this. Appreciate the insights. We have taken the same stance when building our privacy preserving analytics and engagement tool- appICE.<p>Do keep posting and we would be happy to share your story with our customers.
Recently I've been thinking there must be a better way.<p>I want rich insights from a session angle, but I mostly want to know performance timings and what my end users experience. How can I improve my web apps to increase engagement, and where are the issues on my website as it's seen from a user's perspective.<p>My current thought (not yet implemented) is to take several existing things and to glue them together.<p>1. Boomerang <a href="https://github.com/akamai/boomerang" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/akamai/boomerang</a> is a Real User Monitoring JS include that is open source and comes from the Yahoo and Akamai performance teams<p>2. Grafana Cloud <a href="https://grafana.com/products/cloud/" rel="nofollow">https://grafana.com/products/cloud/</a> has Loki and Prometheus for log consumption and metrics respectively and now has a self serve plan of $50 per month (but I think this is reasonable as the data storage is managed for you and you could run many instances of RUM monitoring via this to spread the cost reasonably)<p>3. Write a simple server to receive the Boomerang requests, log each request received in full detail and structured. At the same time increment Prometheus metrics. Let Loki and Prometheus then put that into Grafana Cloud.<p>Then it's just a case of using Grafana to configure a dashboard to offer whatever views, alerts, analysis that you want.<p>The thing I like about this is that no matter what the website the inputs are the same (whatever Boomerang provides), and so the dashboards are inherently shareable so that others can use them.