Presumably at some sort of additional cost, though. So then we’re into the business of weighing up whether to spend money on obtaining raw logs or purchasing the CDN’s own traffic analytics add on… or just going with a third party. This stuff isn’t just built in.
There are data sources that are difficult or expensive to obtain but provide a more accurate gauge of web traffic. For example, ad networks can provide this. You can dig deeper and get a representative sample of data from sources such as the OpenDNS Investigate platform.
It's a cool product, but the market fit isn't perfect yet.
The speculation is that NachoAnalytics (they let you "spy" on your competitor's traffic) does something similar -> using lots of general purpose extensions to collect data.
I'd be surprised if they did. This seems pretty specific to their kind of high volume traffic business. And to their distributed nature of data and latency management etc. Not sure how applicable it will be to other businesses.
That said, since it is at its core a logging tool of sorts, it's possible that it's decoupled enough to put it out. But that's really stretching it.
I'd be curious to see a cost estimate for some traffic level. I wonder if there's a way to put the pixel in s3 and process the access logs more cheaply.
Sidenote: You pretty much generated traffic analytics anyway, and nginx logs have referrer information if you want to see where the traffic is coming from.
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