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Comment by chaosite | Hacker News Reader

One of the reason Google Analytics (and logging solutions like it) is popular is that people don't have access to server logs.

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Server side logs aren’t an accurate way of doing analytics and bring up compliance challenges (storing access logs and using them for purposes other than security etc.)

> Server side logs aren’t an accurate way of doing analytics ...

Based on what? Server side logs records what the server itself sent. That sounds like it should offer far more accuracy than what a JS only solution would do.

That being said, if the code for analysing the server logs is lousy, it's not going to help. :)

The identifier in server logs is IP address, which is useless for distinguishing users. On the corporate side, NAT hides all the visits of many people behind a single IP. On the consumer side, ISPs change IP addresses all the time so a single person will show up as multiple IP addresses.

Note that I'm just talking about distinguishing people, not identifying or tracking. A basic question like "how many people came to my website today" is more accurately answered with client-side analytics than by analyzing web server logs.

> A basic question like "how many people came to my website today" is more accurately answered with client-side analytics than by analyzing web server logs.

How can client side analytics be more accurate, when ad blockers stop visits from even being registered by client-side analytics?

Before looking at accuracy, you already have compliance challenges with logging IPs / user agents and using it for analytics purposes.

Please don't try and change the goal posts. You said:

> Server side logs aren’t an accurate way of doing analytics...

What is your thinking behind that statement, as it sounds incorrect?

What compliance is challenged by logging user agents?

Can you talk a little bit more about why server side logs aren't accurate for analytics? I was planning on doing basic analytics (pageviews mostly) using Cloudfront access logs stored in an S3 bucket and queried through Athena for a site I'm working on which uses the AWS stack.

I know Cloudfront logs can sometimes drop, but is there a more important reason you're talking about?

I think with server-side only is harder to filter bots, crawlers and get accurate bounce rates or session length times.

Shameless plug, you might want to have a look at https://github.com/ownstats/ownstats

You mean unpopular?

Popular. Because adding lines of javascript is much easier than processing server log files.

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