I have a ruby on rails application and it would be nice to see how many hits I get per hour. Is there some simple free software to do this or do I have to develop a custom solution? Thanks!
Other options:
You can use log analyzers but you also get some delay as most of them should be ran by something like cron (and info will not be as complete as with google analytics)
Another option is to add some before_filter to your ApplicationController and write info to db (info also will not be as complete) or search for plugin with such functionality
Check out Woopra. They have a java application that you can download and run to analyze your traffic and visitors in a very visual manner. Also you can literally see ping dots on a global map showing instantaneous visitors. You install a piece of javascript code and then users visiting your site will be tracked similar to google's analytics, but in a more immediate and in my opinion useful manner.
There's a lot more features that they have available like tracking the page progression that a user clicks through, and others.
I absolutely LOVE glTail.rb http://www.fudgie.org/
it's on github here: http://github.com/Fudge/gltail
Best part is, it's open source, Ruby, and free. :-D