Best traffic / performance / usage monitoring module?

Question

Are there any open source commercial packages (or, I think, commercial ones) that you can connect to your site for monitoring purposes? I would like something that we can connect to our ASP.NET site and use to report on things like:

• performance over time
• current load
• page traffic
• SQL performance
• PU time monitoring

Ideally in C # :)

With some sexy graphics.

Change I would also be pleased with the package to which I can transfer statistics and data representations, and it analyzes trends, detects abnormal behavior (for example, “no one has logged in for the last hour. Is this normal?”, “High traffic levels detected”, "a small number of APIs found") and are usually very useful. Is there such a thing?

In my last office, we had a large screen that showed us the loads and loads of performance counters over several time intervals, and we could notice that strange things were happening, but the data was not saved, and there was no way to report this. His package for this is what I am after.

Answer 1

http://www.serverdensity.com/

Answer 2

It should be noted that Google analytics is not an accurate representation of the use of the website. This is because the web beacon (web error) used on the page does not always load for the following reasons:

• Google Analytics servers are called in millions of pages every second and may not always be able to process requests in a timely manner.
• Users often view the page before the full page loads, and therefore there is not enough time to download the Google web beacon to record a hit.
• Google Analytics requires javascript to be installed, which can be disabled.
• Quite a lot (but not a significant amount) of people block google-analytics.com from their browsers, including me.

Physical log files are the best "real" representation of site usage when recording each request. Alternatively, there are much better “professional” packages, including my favorite Omniture, which has much better response time, alternative methods of recording actions, and more functionality.

Answer 3

If you are after things like server data, RRDTool to be something you need? It is not really a statistics program like a web server, although I don’t know how it scales.

Edit:

I also found Splunk Swarm if you are interested in something that looks cool.

Answer 4

Google Analytics is free (up to 50,000 views per month, I think) and easily customizable with just a small javascript snippet to insert in your header or footer and has excellent detailed reports with some very good graphs.

Answer 5

Google Analytics quickly sets up and provides sexier graphs than you can shake a stick.

http://www.google.com/analytics/

Answer 6

Do not reinvent here, but it is on my task list for customization. http://awstats.sourceforge.net/

Answer 7

@Ian

Looks like they raised the limit. Not very surprising, this is google after all;)

This free version is limited to 5 million page views per month, but users with an active Google AdWords account are provided with unlimited tracking of page views.

http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55543

Answer 8

One option is to use external monitoring tools that will monitor network performance outside the firewall, simulating the actions of the end user.

Catchpoint Systems has an interesting approach that requires very little coding and gives you performance statistics outside of the data center and from inside asp.net (for example, processing time, etc.).

http://www.catchpoint.com/products.html