Piwik!
Piwik?
Piwik is an open - source alternative to Google Analytics. You can read the ultimate comparison here.
Why change?
I've been using Google Analytics since its beginning. Was I happy with it? Yes. So why did I change it finally? I have couple of reasons:
- Because I didn't use 90% functionalities of GA
- Because I have corporate - paranoia (watched too many movies, played too many games). Don't want Google to control my data
- Because I like hosting my services and scale those
- Because I feel great when my way of hosting Piwik runs faster than Google Analytics
- Because I love learning; and every new service is about learning how to maintain, scale and keep it running smoothly
- Because it's fun to create yet another Ansible playbook
- Because it's fun to host yet another service with Docker
- Because it's fun to have yet another part of cluster (regarding Docker cluster)
- Because Piwik is 100% open - source
How?
Oh it was simple. There are 2 easy (and fast) methods of rolling up Piwik yourself:
- Piwik Ansible playbook - it's quite old and I had to fix couple of lines to make it working with 1.7.2 (created already pull request for those fixes)
- Dockerfile for Piwik / MariaDB
Just choose a way which fits you the most (or poke around your own one).
Anything else?
Just remember to make sure that Piwik content headers have gzip compression and also caching enabled. Hosting own analytics site means many requests to the public interfaces so those should be optimized very well.
