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Ask HN: How important are real time analytics?

5 pointsby vicjicamaalmost 4 years ago
Hi<p>I am working on a very rudimentary analytics tool for a couple of projects.<p>I only capture page views, unique visitors (a hash), referrals, timeOnSite, agent info, load time for each page and every hour I aggregate the result and store them on a CDN. I also have some alerts that are triggered and sent immediately.<p>This leads to a cost effective and simple solution... but I am totally missing the real-time statistics, so far I am ok with this, I only review the results once or twice a day or when an alert is triggered.<p>But I was wondering if there is something important that I am missing without the real time information? Why is the real time information useful for you? How much do you spend reviewing the real time analytics?<p>Thank you.

3 comments

jackgoldingalmost 4 years ago
I&#x27;m the digital analytics manager for a company that does multi-billion dollars in ecommerce. The real time analytics our ops team use doesn&#x27;t use any of this behavioral information.<p>Only place it&#x27;s been asked for by an operations team is during large (1m+) email sends to ensure there isn&#x27;t a spike in traffic to error pages.
Gustomaximusalmost 4 years ago
For me real-time is useful in 3 applications;<p>1) Error monitoring like site down.<p>2) System checking, like checking analytics is working directly after setup.<p>3) Amusing&#x2F;impressing non-tech types that they can see who is on their website at that moment when I try to explain the value of analytics.
cardosofalmost 4 years ago
In my experience real time data is only relevant for teams that either monitor major site changes or monitor operations. I mostly work with marketing&#x2F;retail and I couldn&#x27;t think of, let&#x27;s say, having a Black Friday event without real time stats.