Snowplow co-founder here. Thanks for mentioning us liquidcool :-)
Snowplow is a little different from Piwik - Piwik is a LAMP-stack opensource app which replicates a GA-style analytics experience.
Snowplow is more of a scalable event analytics platform - it is built on AWS (CloudFront, Elastic MapReduce, Redshift), does _not_ have a UI but has a very clean & simple event model[1] and scales horizontally to billions of events.
To date, Snowplow is mostly used by web companies that want to warehouse their granular event data to build custom analyses, segment users, personalize sites etc.
I want to take this opportunity to praise SnowPlow.
They allow for collection from just about anywhere. Options include Javascript, GIF beacons for email embed, Arduino, and anything else that can send HTTP GET requests.
Snowplow's collection can be performed by Amazon CloudFront, which results in absurdly low latency world-wide, for cheap. I think I estimated around $0.60 per million hits. However, Snowplow is very decoupled, so collection can also occur on NodeJS servers, or anything else that conforms to their spec. In fact, everything is fairly neatly decoupled, so if you think something would run better in [FAVORITE_LANUAGE/PLATFORM] you are free to implement it.
I run Snowplow on my blog, but only run collection for right now. Eventually, when I get around to setting up the rest of Snowplow, I'll be able to crunch the numbers. This is huge - most analytics services require processing and collection to be closely tied.
All that said, Snowplow isn't plug and play like Google Analytics or even Piwik is. You need to be willing to patiently wade through the Snowplow documentation.
Both Piwik and Snowplow emulate Google Analytics too closely. Using the same syntax is silly, and limits their potential. I'm still waiting for an entirely JSON based analytics service.
On the JSON/GA point - thanks for the feedback. We are slowly but surely evolving from our GA-style API, e.g. with our tracker support for new Mixpanel-style unstructured events (though they are not - yet - supported in our ETL/storage):
We are moving our event model to be Avro-based later this year and then yes we may look at completing our existing tracker protocol with something more JSON-centric. So lots on the horizon!
wow! May I ask where you advertised Snowplow so far? I can't believe that I don't know it.
Awesome product, looks a little hard to setup, due to the Hadoop linkage, but definitely worth to be used on my next projects. Maybe worth making a vm appliance, puppet/chef, or docker script for easier deployment.
Why haven't I ever heard of it? I usually "snowplow" the web for all kinds of software, but it appears that I haven't crossed the marketing channels you've targeted.
Thanks for the kind words X4! Marketing-wise - we are just growing organically, slowly building the userbase as more people come into contact with what we're offering.
Deployment-wise - it is a bit fiddly to set up. A community member is hopefully going to work on some Opscode Chef and Amazon CloudFormation scripts so that should make it a lot easier.
The setup is pretty annoying. I still haven't figured out what permissions need to be granted to IAM users on AWS to do things like spin up the Hadoop jobs.
Having your granular end up in Redshift, ready to be enriched with other biz data sources is a beautiful, beautiful thing, and completely worth it.
Comments
Snowplow co-founder here. Thanks for mentioning us liquidcool :-)
Snowplow is a little different from Piwik - Piwik is a LAMP-stack opensource app which replicates a GA-style analytics experience.
Snowplow is more of a scalable event analytics platform - it is built on AWS (CloudFront, Elastic MapReduce, Redshift), does _not_ have a UI but has a very clean & simple event model[1] and scales horizontally to billions of events.
To date, Snowplow is mostly used by web companies that want to warehouse their granular event data to build custom analyses, segment users, personalize sites etc.
If anybody has any questions, just shout!
[1] https://github.com/snowplow/snowplow/blob/master/4-storage/r...
I want to take this opportunity to praise SnowPlow.
They allow for collection from just about anywhere. Options include Javascript, GIF beacons for email embed, Arduino, and anything else that can send HTTP GET requests.
Snowplow's collection can be performed by Amazon CloudFront, which results in absurdly low latency world-wide, for cheap. I think I estimated around $0.60 per million hits. However, Snowplow is very decoupled, so collection can also occur on NodeJS servers, or anything else that conforms to their spec. In fact, everything is fairly neatly decoupled, so if you think something would run better in [FAVORITE_LANUAGE/PLATFORM] you are free to implement it.
I run Snowplow on my blog, but only run collection for right now. Eventually, when I get around to setting up the rest of Snowplow, I'll be able to crunch the numbers. This is huge - most analytics services require processing and collection to be closely tied.
All that said, Snowplow isn't plug and play like Google Analytics or even Piwik is. You need to be willing to patiently wade through the Snowplow documentation.
Both Piwik and Snowplow emulate Google Analytics too closely. Using the same syntax is silly, and limits their potential. I'm still waiting for an entirely JSON based analytics service.
Thanks so much for the words of encouragement!
On the JSON/GA point - thanks for the feedback. We are slowly but surely evolving from our GA-style API, e.g. with our tracker support for new Mixpanel-style unstructured events (though they are not - yet - supported in our ETL/storage):
https://github.com/snowplow/snowplow/wiki/2-Specific-event-t...
We are moving our event model to be Avro-based later this year and then yes we may look at completing our existing tracker protocol with something more JSON-centric. So lots on the horizon!
wow! May I ask where you advertised Snowplow so far? I can't believe that I don't know it.
Awesome product, looks a little hard to setup, due to the Hadoop linkage, but definitely worth to be used on my next projects. Maybe worth making a vm appliance, puppet/chef, or docker script for easier deployment.
Why haven't I ever heard of it? I usually "snowplow" the web for all kinds of software, but it appears that I haven't crossed the marketing channels you've targeted.
Thanks for the kind words X4! Marketing-wise - we are just growing organically, slowly building the userbase as more people come into contact with what we're offering.
Deployment-wise - it is a bit fiddly to set up. A community member is hopefully going to work on some Opscode Chef and Amazon CloudFormation scripts so that should make it a lot easier.
The setup is pretty annoying. I still haven't figured out what permissions need to be granted to IAM users on AWS to do things like spin up the Hadoop jobs.
Having your granular end up in Redshift, ready to be enriched with other biz data sources is a beautiful, beautiful thing, and completely worth it.
Funnily enough, have been working on that exact setup gripe this afternoon:
https://github.com/snowplow/snowplow/wiki/IAM-setup
(work in progress ;-)