Best traffic / performance / usage monitoring module?

Question

Are there any open source (or I guess commercial) packages that you can plug into your site for monitoring purposes? I\'d like something that we can hook up to our ASP.NET s

Answer 1

It should be noted that google analytics is not an accurate representation of web site usage. This is because the web beacon (web bug) used on the page does not always load for these reasons:

1. Google analytics servers are called by millions of pages every second and can not always process the requests in a timely fashion.
2. Users often browse away from a page before the full page has loaded and thus there is not enough time to load Googles web beacon to record a hit.
3. Google analytics require javascript to be installed which can be disabled.
4. Quite a few (but not substantial amount) of people block google-analytics.com from their browsers, myself included.

The physical log files are the best 'real' representation of site usage as they record every request. Alternatively there are far better 'professional' packages, of which Omniture is my favourite, which have much better response times, alternative methods for recording actions and more functionality.

Answer 2

Google Analytics is free (up to 50,000 hits per month I think) and is easy to setup with just a little javascript snippet to insert into your header or footer and has great detailed reports, with some very nice graphs.