How are you providing analytics to your users?
Sorry if this is an obvious question but I'm not even sure how to "google" this without getting the wrong kind of solution so I figured id ask here.
I'm building my project and as a part of that, I'd like to be able to provide my customers with analytics of their use of the project (how many times an event happened over time, min-values, max-values, etc). Now, I know I can build up my own suite of customer analytics tools and track in my own database every time something happens and then query/process that data to display for them on a dashboard, but I refuse to believe that EVERYONE is rolling their own solution to this...
There has to be some Analytics-as-a-Service out there that does this no? Something like https://www.algolia.com/ but instead of "search" it's for analytics.
I dont BELIEVE that Google Analytics / bearmetrics / mixpanel / etc are what Im looking for because those seem to be more about tracking customers actions using your product for YOUR sake, im looking for something that I can use to provide my customers with their own analytics of them using my product.
TL;DR - How are you guys tracking, processing, calculating, and querying information for your customers such as API usage, events over time, averages over time, etc? Are you rolling your own analytics solution or is there a service out there that im just to new to be aware of?
Thanks!
I currently use Keen.io. It's really awesome and has a great DX. I was able to implement customer facing analytics in just a few days.
But it has one problem. It has become extremely expensive. At first, they had a really good pay-as-you-go model. But then they changed it to a subscription model starting at $150/mo. And now it is $299/mo.
So I'm also looking for this kind of solution. I also saw Datawave which looks promising. Their API looks incredibly similar to Keen's API.
Ahhh ok. Yeah I think dropping $150/mo might be a non-starter for me right out the bat at this point but its cool to know that something like this exists already
Still want to look into Datawaves too, its on my long list of potential options whevever I get closer to add that feature into my app
Something came up today on PH.
https://www.producthunt.com/posts/datawaves
Hope it helps.
Ooo, cool. I’ll check it out! Thanks
Have you thought of using a self-hosted analytics platform? I think it's the middle way between building everything yourself and using a service.
It is interesting that even though I am building an analytics platform this problem of offering your users analytics only started coming up more often recently.
What exactly is a user's "project" ? Is it hosted on a different domain or is it just a page on your own domain?
I am working on a new version and I think it might be worth spending the time to make this use-case easier to integrate into applications. Currently you can record all data on a single server and give different users access to different sites, but the access is only granular at domain level, so each project has to be on it's own domain.
Let me know if you'd ever consider something like this and if not, why?
I would be looking for analytics of things user do within my own app/domain, not so much anything beyond that (at least in theory). And self hosting might be easier than building everything my self as far as time but I wonder if itd actually be quicker than just rolling out analytics slowly over time (I used firebase for my backend so slowly adding in new event hooks is pretty easy). My biggest "con" with that is doing meaningful queries. If a self-hosted / external service would let me do things like "get the monthly average of X over the last 6 months for customer Y where some event value equals Z" THEN I'd maybe look into doing that than the slower/easier self rollout. Is that something your analytics platform offers?