ankane/ahoy
Ahoy
Ahoy is a first-party analytics framework for Ruby on Rails applications. It provides tools for capturing user behaviors and page views, allowing developers to maintain full ownership of their analytics data.
The system distinguishes itself through relational data analytics, which links visit identifiers directly to application models for deep business object attribution. It includes a privacy-preserving tracking tool that utilizes IP address masking and cookie-less visitor grouping to anonymize user data.
The project covers a broad range of analytics capabilities, including custom event tracking, geographic location resolution via IP geocoding, and user funnel analysis. It manages data through relational database persistence and uses pre-aggregated rollups to maintain query performance on large datasets. Additional infrastructure features include asynchronous message routing, middleware-level traffic filtering to exclude bots, and a dedicated API for collecting data from mobile or external clients.
Features
- First-Party Collection - Implements a first-party collection strategy to route analytics data through custom domains for reliable tracking.
- User Activity Logs - Logs actions performed by users with custom property metadata across web and native applications.
- Custom Event Tracking - Records named events with associated properties to monitor specific user behaviors.
- First-Party Visit Tracking - Records visits and events from web and native applications to provide first-party analytics.
- Model-Visit Associations - Links analytics visit identifiers to application model columns to connect website visits to specific records.
- Relational Analytics Engines - Links visit identifiers to application models for deep business object attribution using relational data.
- Visit Identifier Linking - Associates application records with specific visits by storing a unique visit identifier directly on the model.
- Privacy-Preserving Analytics - Provides a framework for measuring visitor behavior while maintaining anonymity through IP masking and cookie-less tracking.
- Authenticated User Tracking - Associates tracked visits with authenticated users to build a comprehensive history of user-specific activity.
- Analytics Frameworks - Provides a first-party analytics system for tracking visits and custom events directly within Ruby on Rails applications.
- Geographic Location Settings - Determines visitor country, region, and city using local databases or load balancer headers.
- Analytics APIs - Receives visit and event data from mobile apps or external clients through dedicated network endpoints.
- Analytics Data Routing - Sends tracked visits and events to relational databases or message queues.
- Conversion Funnel Analytics - Measures conversion rates by tracking the progression of visitors through a sequence of specific events.
- Automated Rollup Engines - Summarizes high-volume event data into periodic totals to maintain fast query performance on large datasets.
- Rollup Aggregations - Pre-aggregates event and visit data into rollups to maintain query performance with large datasets.
- IP Geolocation - Maps visitor IP addresses to physical locations and network metadata for geographic analysis.
- Relational Database Persistence - Stores visit and event data in standard database tables to allow complex querying via SQL.
- IP Geographic Mapping - Maps request IP addresses to physical locations using local databases or load balancer headers.
- Event Property Queries - Provides capabilities to filter and aggregate event data using custom properties stored in the database.
- Traffic Source Capture - Captures traffic source, geographic location, and UTM parameters for every page view.
- Message Queue Routing - Offloads tracking data to external brokers or queues to prevent analytics logging from blocking the main request.
- IP Geolocation Resolvers - Resolves IP addresses into geographic locations using local databases, load balancer headers, or third-party services.
- IP Address Anonymization - Protects privacy by stripping the final octets of IP addresses before saving them to the database.
- Request Filtering Middleware - Intercepts incoming requests to exclude bots or blacklisted IP addresses before they are recorded as visits.
- Cookie-Less Tracking - Identifies returning visitors by hashing IP masks and user agents when cookies are unavailable.
- Analytics and Tracking - A foundation for tracking visits and events across platforms.
- Logging and Monitoring - Tracks visits and events across platforms.
