What do you use for backend analytics?
Hey!
Just wondering, what does everyone use for backend analytics? To see things like how many users signed up, or how many did a particular actions, or how many times your cron job ran? I personally tried using google analytics (using the universal-analytics node package) and sending custom events, however its interface is highly geared towards front-ends and I feel like its event reporting isn't that great.
I'm considering trying Datadog and self hosting countly, but just wondering are there any other options out there?
Twik offers free access to its BI system, and it's very straight forward and easy to handle. The main plus of this service is that it is completely cookies free - it does not rely on cookies whatsoever, but rather leverages a novel fingerprint technology (much better if you're willing to have flawless user profiling, targeting, and quick audience building processes).
What is "cron job"?
This comment was deleted 2 years ago
thank you!
^ Pretty much spot on. Generally you'd want to ensure that your cron jobs are running. In this case you can also send yourself an email to make sure, but there are also other cron jobs to clean up your database or do other tasks which don't really show up in which case analytics would be helpful
that makes sense! thank you
right now, i'm always defaulting to Amplitude. the free tier is more than enough for my current startup and with the SDKs you can just add a line of code in every button tap and name the event type!
I used to use Keen.io, but after they dramatically raised their prices, I wrote my own. They're lower-level and much better for event analytics than Mixpanel, but post-acquisition they just kept moving up market.
If I had to choose something and couldn't write my own, I'd use Amplitude.
at work, we're using Instana: instana.io
toilet
Datadog is a minefield of billing. I tried to only use their logging and ended up with a $300+ bill. Don't do it.
Yeah I didn't mention it in the OP but I used datadog for a month, paying $3 for logging and ending up with a $18 bill because I was sending some metrics which were covered under the free plan but ended up costing me because I decided to pay specifically for logging.
Metabase + Google Analytics is even better than datadog tbh because Metabase's UI is better
You can use https://btfy.io for tracking user signups, just create a link and use that on your buttons. It also has an API for link creation so you can create dynamic links on the fly.
ELK setup and write custom queries to build dashboards.
Thanks for the response! Do you host it to yourself or do you recommend using a provider?
self-hosting to start with and when you know nuances and that's your major focus, you will figure out whether to do it inhouse or use a provider
This comment was deleted 6 years ago
There are a lot of things that don't end up in your database. For example what if you send newsletter emails in a cron job? You'd want to know how many were successfully sent. You could add that as an "event" in your database, but you still need a way to visualize it which I've found Metabase to do well
This comment was deleted a year ago
Thanks for this. I had hacked together a solution with Zapier, Google sheets and Google data studio. Metabase looks much simpler and potentially more powerful.
Metabase is exactly what I was looking for! It can even pull from Google Analytics, this is perfect, thank you!