As most of you know, there are several popular methods for obtaining statistics for your blog. While Google Analytics is probably the most comprehensive one I know (with the added benefit of being free), it is limited somewhat by the fact the the statistics are not real-time. For most practical purposes, that limitation isn’t a big deal, but it’s sometimes nice to be able to see what’s going on within your website in real time.
On the recommendation of a friend, I splurged the $30 to finally see what Mint was all about. If you haven’t heard of it, Mint is a commercial statistics package with a pile of open-source plugins (called “Peppers” in Mint terminology). On my system, I have Peppers that display Wordpress comments, downloads, most popular posts, and bandwidth. If you’re into podcasting, there are even Peppers for that.
I’ve been using it for the past two weeks now, and for the most part I am extremely happy with it. If gives me a vary comprehensive real-time snapshot of my blog at any time, and displays just enough information to be useful, but not overwhelming (something that Google Analytics doesn’t so so well, although some might argue that’s the point of it).
If you’re looking for something similar, I would highly recommend it.
You didn’t address the most natural question, performance? Any automatic safeties?
Hmm, in what context? I think it works pretty quickly, given the amount of data it seems to collect.
I was thinking that anything running on your own servers has a performance impact. How would it behave if you were suddenly getting a lot of traffic? With GA you don’t have to worry.
For automatic safeties, I was wondering if it goes into a light mode if under a lot of pressure. For bonus points any integration with Viper Cache ;-)
Well, it works the same way that Google analytics does - that is it requires a blob of javascript in the header/footer of all your pages. So in that regards, I don’t think it’s really that different that Google. I’ve never noticed any problems with it. When you go into the Mint backend it seems to do a bit of work, so I suspect the actual download of the JS file just logs a bit of data for later. You should check it out - I’ve been quite happy with it.