During the development phase of a recent project, another developer and I spent a good amount of time trying to find a anayltics package to use on a new application. Our requirements were short and sweet, but it was difficult to find a package that did was we needed out of the box. We did not review any log analyzers due to the need for up to the minute stats.

Requirements:

• Collect stats via PHP (no javascript needed on every page).
• Work with Oracle, not just MySQL.
• We own the data (no hosted solutions).
• API available to access pieces of data.
• Handle stat collection for 2 million page views a day.

We looked at:

Package	PHP Collection	Multiple DB's	Non-SAS	API	Load Capable
Google Analytics	-	-	-	-	x
Mint	-	-	x	-	-
Clicky	-	-	-	x	?
Omniture	-	-	-	?	-
Urchin 6	-	-	x	?	x
Piwik	-	-	x	x	?
SlimStat	x	-	x	x	?

Google Analytics is the old standby that probably 90% of the internet uses. It does not have an API, but stats can be accessed via PHP by using a little coding to login and access the xml reports. This proved to work, but was a pain to manage and could be broken by changes from Google.

We actually contacted Mint's creator to ask some questions about Mint's capabilities. His response was less then helpful. We also heard from other developers that Mint could not handle the load that we were considering.

Clicky has a lot going for it. Unfortunately, SAS's are an automatic disqualification due to the risk involved with losing access to the stats.

The marketing guys currently use Omniture to tracks stats, but when we inquired about an API, Omniture wanted to limit us to 10,000 requests per day. With roughly 3,000 active bloggers, at 3 blogs a day, this is not including the less then active bloggers, we would max that limit in hours. This disqualified Omniture.

We had the brass convinced to purchase Urchin 6 until we stumbled upon a little open source package.

Piwik shows massive amounts of potential. Unfortunately, since it is still in Alpha/Beta stages, we were a little nervous to commit to it. I would keep an eye on it if you are interested in an open source Google Analytics type package.

In the end, we decided to take SlimStat and adapt it to work with Oracle. It's an amazing little package, that has PHP stat collection instead of the normal JS collection, has a simple XML feed for web services to look at and the data it collects is fairly compact.

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