Analytics and Performance metrics recommendations

Hello @george, New Relic / DataDog can quickly become quite expensive. I've created www.howfast.tech to help you make sure you website is reachable, and also make sure it is fast enough. HowFast also has an APM feature, similar to what New Relic does, which I can give for you for free if you're willing to try it out :)

For analytics, I have a self-hosted Matomo server running for all my servers, so I don't have to display any GDPR cookie banner (because no third-party). Otherwise Google Analytics is probably one of the most extensive free tool on the market, if you don't mind sending all your users' data to Google.

Hey @george, I run analytics in my day job.

I've written a book and a free email course that helps you with exactly this.

The book has tool recommendations, based on my billion-dollar experience at PlayStation, Rakuten, and at less-than-billion scale on my own projects (spoiler alert: my recommended stack for indies is GA, Mixpanel, and Segment). The chapters after that give you a prioritized order for what's recommended to track (including actions, purchases, errors, and marketing campaign IDs), along with sample code. Also, it shows you how to see reporting on each of those in both of Mixpanel and Google Analytics, with step-by-step screenshots.

For performance, you can certainly use perf-oriented tools like DataDog and Mixpanel (Edit: typo’d this, meant New Relic), but you can also implement performance metrics in the analytics tools to create linkage between high/low performance and marketing outcomes, such as conversion.

I'm an engineer by title, so I'll be speaking your language all the way through. Interested? You can start the free email course here: https://signup.analyticsforindies.com
(I still have to update the copy, but the book is already out)

Amplitude is great and can track up to 10MM monthly events for free (good for user behavior).

Sentry is good for error tracking (up to 500/month for free).

Try Clevertap for in-app notifications

Take a look at splitbee.io :)

I cannot give "strong" recommendations because I myself don't have extensive experience with these tools, but I can tell you what I like.

First of all, I'd say focus on a goal first — rather than just installing and setting up analytics for the hell of it, or because you think you need them. For example, if you want to make your onboarding better you could then decide on how you'd like to do this:

The recorded session route: use tools like hotjar or fullstory to record user sessions and determine where they're getting stuck.

OR maybe you'd like to improve feature adoption: Then tools like mixpanel and amplitude are great. Pick one that suits your needs and just play around with it.

I use two services from fellow indie hackers.

For analytics I use Plausible. They are very privacy-oriented and very transparent. Really a great startup.

For performance monitoring I recently signed up for Simple Ops. I don't have much experience yet, but it looks very promising.