Re:Using GoAccess for self-hosted web analytics
by joshyi on Saturday December 28, 2019 @10:07AM
(#21899232)
Google Analytics keeps track of visitors using cookies, so if a browser has cookies or JavaScript disabled, then it won't keep track of it. This includes the now so popular adblockers and bots as well. Log analysis such as GoAccess should be able to track these down fine since it works at the server level.
I believe tracking visitors at the client level deflates the actual number of visitors (due to reason listed on #2). On the other hand, server-side tracking gives you a more accurate number at the cost of not knowing for sure if the client is a human behind a browser.
Re:Using GoAccess for self-hosted web analytics
by darekkay on Friday December 27, 2019 @10:41AM
(#21891898)
> GoAccess is great and all, but static log analyzation =/= Google Analytics
True, but this has some advantages as well - GoAccess logs _all_ requests, even when you disable JavaScript an/or use ad blockers. For my blog, I don't care about extensive tracking capabilities. I just want to know what posts are most popular and roughly how much traffic I get. YMMV of course, especially for web applications.
If you really want to replace Google Analytics and have the same level of features and tracking you need a client side system - Matomo is the closest I've seen to that.
All that being said, I've used GoAccess, I like it, but I haven't quite mastered the log format to enable my more robust AWStats logs with GoAccess. I have a bunch of subdomains all as VHosts, and I loved the feature in GoAccess that rolls it all up into a VHost table/chart. However I haven't figured out the log parser settings to get both AWstats and GoAccess to like it with the %v_host field in the logs. Any thoughts/help there?