Building analytics for a custom application - would an open analytics framework (like piwik or owa) be the solution?

Question

An application I am involved with is in dire need of a restructuring of the reports section... I am open to suggestions. All the development is currently in PHP (nginx/php/linux/mysql/redis environment), although other suggestions which fit in to the environment are welcome.

There is already ongoing logging for the current system which feeds into mysql tables. All tables are basically the same structure and different things logged with different logtypes.

There are a couple of different metrics/actions we'd like to report on, and be able to have the users drill down, by date or other filters.

Example metrics:

• User searches a topic. I log his user id, search keyword, each result ID.
• User accesses an item on the system (either from a search result above, or from my main page - i have separate logs for both). I log (currently) the "ID" of the page, the unique ID of the user (all users have an ID), the time, the Category of the page.
• User submits a request for an item. I log the ID of the request (new id), the unique ID of the user, the Category of the report.
• List all users who clicked on item X.
• etc

Can someone give me some opinions on whether I would be able to leverage the existing functionality in Piwik (www.piwik.org) or Open Web Analytics (http://demo.openwebanalytics.com) to build an easy to use dashboard of sorts and report tool? The idea is that most if not all of the queries to insert and to select the data for the metrics above we already have. What we need is a uniform way of displaying the data, where the user can view different reports in a constant format, etc...

Filtering by category where we have a category ID would also be something necessary. Category is a hierarchichal tree and picking a parent node means we basically list all child nodes and make an IN (x,x,x) with all of the child IDs (we are investigating changing to linear tree traversal, but thats for another discussion...)

basically, once again, sorry if this has become confusing: from those who have experience with piwik/owa/other web analytic frameworks, have you used it to deliver custom metrics from custom applications, not related directly to webpage viewing?

If so, could you share examples?

Also, any reasons to favor piwik or owa? OWA seems to have some nice things which we could maybe add in the future like heatmaps and recordings, but the main focus right now is the custom metrics so the web metrics stuff would be disabled at first...

Thanks for the help...

Answer 1

Using Piwik with a mix of Custom Variables & Segmentation should allow for your requirements.

Answer 2

You could do all of this in Open Web Analytics (http://www.openwebanalytics.com) in a variety of ways:

• Action tracking - allows you track arbitrary events. Actions can be grouped and assigned a value and label.

• Trigger "fake" page views for your events that have a custom URI that you look for when querying.

• Use the built in DOM click tracking events to view who clicked on DOM element.

• A custom event fact table - you could create a custom fact table with whatever columns you want and then register new metrics and dimensions for it.

Both approaches can be combined with custom variables and segmentation that OWA has out of the box. I'd try the first approach first as it's by far the easiest to implement.