I'm using phpOpenTracker on a few sites to monitor traffic and how visitors flow through my sites. The feature that sets phpOpenTracker apart from most other stats packages (at least IMHO) is that it allows you to monitor traffic on multiple sites, and review the reports from a single central interface. I've been a long time fan of the Perl app, AXS Visitor Tracking (it generates very useful data), but you have to install it on each and every site you want to monitor, and you then have multiple locations to check to view the reports. That's not very convenient in a multi-site/network environment.

When I first setup phpOpenTracker, I used the default MySQL mode rather than MySQL Merge. Big mistake! After a few months, there was so much data in the system that the report generation slowed to a crawl. The documented solution was to use an included tool called split_tables.php, a script that would perform a merge of the database tables and present you with month to month data instead. Perfect! Problem was: the script didn't work! I scanned the app's mailing list archives and found other people in the same predicament, but no solutions were provided. I posted to the support mailing list and received no replies. Myself and another programmer attempted to rewrite the script, but were unsuccessful. To make matters worse, I was having a helluva time importing the data to a testing database because of the large amount of data. In the end, I intentionally wiped out my three months worth of data and set up the database fresh, this time using MySQL Merge mode. Now, my reports are generating quickly and presenting the much more useful monthly data.

The moral of this story? Think ahead early, think ahead often. I should have seen that using the default MySQL mode on a medium traffic network was going to result in slow reporting down the line. Ah well, hindsight is 20/20 as they say, and at least now I have a great stats system running!