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Comment by 0xADEADBEE | Hacker News Reader

I'm currently enjoying Goaccess [0]. It's command-line based, works on my nginx logs and tells me exactly the things I want to know. Might not be for everyone but I thought I'd share in case someone else found it useful.

I wholeheartedly support Fathom's endeavour and will definitely use them if I go back to JS-based analytics.

[0] - https://goaccess.io/

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Such solutions don’t work if your server is behind a proxy like Cloudflare, since most requests will be served from cache.

And btw, this implies that you’re keeping logs on your visitors for other purposes than security. Under GDPR that’s not OK.

A good analytics solution will anonymize the data. Including Google Analytics if you configure it properly.

The GDPR question depends on what the logs include. If you don't include IP (or anonymize it) and don't include sensitive data (like userids/cookies or POST data) then it should be okay under GDPR. You can for example have one log for security (fail2ban and so on) that includes IP and one for GoAccess that does not.

goaccess has the option to anonymize its data using --anonymize-ip.

While it looks 'cool', it only gives you the basics, besides you need to write some custom scripts to make sure all the logs are continuously fed into it across process restarts and you need to filter out bots with grep.

Also last time I used, it didn't have easy way to filter out by date period, so it's only good for trends of the entire log span which is not really useful by that alone.

Fathom has custom date periods now. And yes, Fathom is meant to give the basics that most non-pro users require. It's a one-page dashboard.

I'm talking about GoAccess.

I was originally taking a look at that a few months ago, but since I have a few other small sites I also wanted to switch over (some of which aren't even on hosts I control), I decided to give Fathom a go.

Honestly, it would be best if there were an easy way to aggregate the logs into something like Fathom or GoAccess from any server with a little daemon running... but well, that's how I do it for larger sites with an EFK-based cluster. It just takes a lot more resources and maintenance!

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