Which free (preferably open source) component would you recommend to capture my website visitation statistics under ASP.NET? I have SqlServer available. I would prefer db at the back end vs file logging because it is reportable.
+6
A:
Forego log parsing altogether and go with Google Analytics. It's more accurate because it counts cached page views that aren't logged. It's portable. It gives a lot of great metrics. And best of all it's free.
BC
2009-02-20 14:44:59
Google analytics is incredible, even compared with pay products.
Chris Ballance
2009-02-20 14:46:26
Beat me to it; I'll delete my answer :-(
Andy Rose
2009-02-20 14:48:26
I have used Google Analytics since it was Urchin and have never had any issues.
Chris Ballance
2009-02-20 14:53:52
A:
If ALL you're wanting to do is track "webpage statistics", then your best bet is to outsource it to Google via Google Analytics.
Recording log data from your application into SQL server is only going to really bring you incremental benefit (over and above using Google Analytics) if you are logging application specific or business domain relevant events in the db.
Otherwise, it is not worth the effort to do the work that Urchin (the company Google bought Analytics from) and Google have already done.
Jay Stevens
2009-02-20 14:50:02
A:
As an alternative (to Google Analytics that some suggested), you can have an ETL process that grabs IIS logs and imports them into SQL. Then run your reports as you wish (ex. SSRS).
Kon
2009-02-20 14:53:00