Ask HN: Which analytics solution do I use? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Which analytics solution do I use?

5 pointsthr0waw4y10 comments

I have a client that has three yoga and spin studios. We have built out a .NET web application for them that allows for users to book bikes, buy packages, etc. The system also has a backend for staff and the management to manage the business. The data is all stored in a MySQL database. We are looking for an analytics solution that allows for us to gain business insights about our historical data in the db as well as give us real-time monitoring of certain metrics as well.

The solution we are looking for should be more about drawing actionable insights and less about fiddling with a BI tool.

What are your suggestions? Ability to integrate social media and data from MindBody API a bonus

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I looked for ages a d ages and compared many tools. In the end, me and many colleagues and peers agreed Microsoft Power BI is currently one of the best offerings out there when evaluated from a price/value/feature perspective. It's about as good as Tableau (considered the industry leader), better generally more powerful than most web based solutions and best of all, free.

It's worth watching some videos on YouTube about it.

Check out Slemma. You can connect directly to your MySQL database and build dashboards that you can schedule to refresh each minute. The tool allows to aggregate, pivot data and calculate new fields, so that you and your less tech-savvy teammates can find insights easily. You can also share findings across the team in different ways.

Splunk.

100% fully featured and 100% free for data volume that is 500MB/day or less.

Infinitely scalable, manageable and supportable.

But then I am biased :)

Depending on the technical abilities of the person using the solution, I would recommend one of the below two systems:

- Chartio: A good tool for someone who isn't very technical to discover insights. Drag-and-drop interface.

- Periscope: A good tool for someone who is able to write SQL to build visualizations from their queries.

What's your price point? What's their annual revenue? How many customers are we talking here?

Don't want to limit by price at this time. Revenues in low millions, several thousand customers.

Easy suggestions are Tableau or Splunk. You'd probably be able to ride Splunk for free (unless you had zounds of data), and Tableau is cheap (but not realtime).

Since you mentioned that you don't want to be limited by price, Tableau is a tool that has been really great for analyzing data. The slice and dice capabilities allow you to truly explore your data.

Checkout https://segment.com. They are super duper easy to send the data to, and have a ton of integrations.

setting up dashboards on google analytics is pretty simple and might fit your needs without an additional service. You can also download existing dashboards from https://www.google.com/analytics/gallery/#landing/start/

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