Private analytics for web applications

Question

We have a few private web applications which we would like to record user activity on in order to get some insight into how users are using the apps, very similar to Google Analytics.

Normally we would simply use a service such as Google Analytics, Mint, Clicky, or otherwise, but due to the sensitivity of the content the applications are dealing with (similar to an online accounting app) I would rather keep the service internal and not risk sending usage data to an external service (mainly for privacy but also to keep everything in house and avoid annoying users if they discover the data being sent out).

We have had some ideas of just recording activity in a database (such as requests, session times etc.) and then analyzing the data later, but if there are solutions out there already it would be better to consider those first.

Our apps are built in Rails 3.x, on Ubuntu servers with a PostgreSQL back-end, but we have a variety of system tools built in different languages so PHP tools or otherwise aren't a limitation.

What options are there for this kind of analytics?

Answer 1

Have a look at piwik.org

Does a lot of similar things to GA, can be self-hosted and is reasonably pretty too.