Evaluating rails web statistics / analytics plugins

I recently completed an evaluation of rails plugins for gathering statistics. I tried railstat, sitealyzer, and hit_tracker. To save the suspense I would recommend against using any of them. I had 2 separate scenarios: simple hit tracking for pages and web statistics for a site. These 3 plugins are what I came across in my searches. Here are my experiences with each.

With hit_tracker thankfully I looked at the code before actually trying it on an app. I realized that it did not suit my needs. It actually creates an entry for each hit which makes it overly resource intensive for simple hit tracking. And while it supports creating hits of a certain “kind” (ie you could track page views and page edits separately) it only allows you retrieve total hits. I was able to roll my own solution in about an hour that is far superior. Perhaps I should make it into a plugin and release it.

I actually ran sitealizer on an app for a few days. I was convinced that it was failing to log significant amounts of traffic. Its stats were not intuitively laid out. It also seemed to cause errors in the app from time to time dealing with some sort of lock. It’s also out of date and not well maintained. To get it working for Rails 2 I had to edit sitealizer/init.rb and add to the end the line:

• ActionController::Base.append_view_path File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__), 'lib/app/views')

My biggest problem with railstat is that it is only a generator and it does not look like it receives a lot of attention. The problem with generators is that they are hard to upgrade. One problem with web statistics programs is that they often need to be updated with new definitions of browsers and bots. The documentation for railstat is also poor without even simple clear installation instructions.