About

LiveStatistics for your website

Details

If Google Analytics (formerly Urchin) has become one of the most popular tracking systems, it fails at being live because of its architecture. You only get valid data the day after which is the default view anyways. I tried to make something to improve the actual solution we are using at work.

What we do have at work is a basic session counter. It helps us not pushing a release when a lot of people are surfing the website even it has been easier since we switched from Mongrel to Passenger. From a simple number, like “280 sessions” I’d try to move that to the next level and having a view of the actual usage.

The idea is to count views and to store that into memcached using the current time as a key and putting a timeout of the length of the needed graph.

Usage

How to activate it:

cache = MemCache.new("127.0.0.1:11211")
use LiveStats, cache, :period => 3600, :precision => 10

Example application and screenshot there: Live statistics for your website