Sure,
Omniture uses what I call a "client side" tracking technique using
javascript to dynamically markup an image tag with a query string and
fetch that image from Omniture's servers sending data to them via the
query string. Google and Yahoo offer similar services with less
sophisticated features, but the approach is effectively the same. The
data is stored on Omniture's servers and available for reporting in near
real time especially when it comes to basic traffic data. It is
probably important to note that Omniture and awstats are not mutually
exclusive. One is server based and the other runs on the webpage
sending data to a hosted platform.
I would have to dig into details to completely expose what our license
agreement with Omniture is as is applies to the usage of their software
since is a service that we buy from them. Omniture is more akin to
Salesforce.com and Google Analytics.
To get started with the base functionality of Omniture you drop in some
javascript, hopefully in a header or footer, and a few minutes later you
can login to your account and start looking at traffic reports.
Omniture has many sophisticated features one of which has the interest
of Red Hat in response to your comment about Red Hat's needs relating to
Fedora. We have the capability with Omniture to do cross-domain path
analysis. That is, we can gain much deeper insight into the
relationship between the two or more sites from tracking cross site
browsing behavior. We can track visitor paths across multiple sites
including our international sites. This extends beyond simple entry and
exit page analysis. The data is rich and the reporting interface
powerful to the extent that it takes some time to explore all the
different capabilities should the Fedora community wish to use Omniture
for some of its own reporting.
We have been asked by the JBoss folks to setup jboss.org and I am
currently working with that group to outfit jboss.org. It is almost a
cut and paste task into a header template for basic tracking and you are
welcome to sit in (with my management's approval of course) on that
deployment and post deployment reporting. The decision as to whether
deploying a piece of javascript code on a fedora.org page supplied by
Red Hat using a Red Hat funded hosting service like Omniture is in
conflict with Fedora's core mission in my opinion clearly belongs to the
Fedora community.
Thanks,
Jesse
Jesse Keating wrote:
On Thu, 28 Feb 2008 16:01:48 -0500
Jesse Eversole Jr <jeversol@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Anyone who would like to know more about how our website tracking
infrastructure works please feel free to contact me. It suffices to
say that you will find it far superior to awstats having been a user
of awstats in the past.
Hi Jesse. The question of superiority isn't interesting. Fedora is
very very committed to doing what it needs to get done using completely
opensource products when possible. (I say when possible to avoid
derailed discussions about PC bioses and router firmwares)
The reality is that Fedora itself would not make use of any thing that
Omniture may learn from our site. We're doing just fine with awstats,
and anything we feel is missing from awstats we'd work with the
upstream to provide that functionality.
However, if Red Hat as a corporation feels that they need to gather
some information about the Fedora websites, and that information is
only available through Omniture, and getting data to Omniture is only
possible through runtime java scripts, that's something else to discuss.
Can you explain what the java scripts are, how they work, what license
they're under, etc..?
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