Announcing: Google Analytics plugin for Confluence
by David. Average Reading Time: about a minute.
I’m pleased to announce the release of my first Confluence plugin — Google Analytics plugin for Confluence.
It lists Google Analytics reports for a particular Confluence space – from within that space. The current version has 10 reports and shows the first 20 results for each report.
- Top Content
- Depth of Visit
- Internal Search
- Browser and OS
- Browser Version
- Screen Resolution
- Network
- City
- All Traffic Sources
- Search Engine Keywords
Just before Christmas, Atlassian quietly approved the plugin on their Plugin Exchange website. Since then, Matt Hodges posted a great write up about it on the Atlassian website — Report Confluence Activity Using Google Analytics in the Wiki.
Screencasts and live demonstrations
I’ve done a couple of screencast demos on usage and configuration:
But better than that, it’s now out in the wild and you can try it for yourself on other people’s sites:
- Atlassian have installed it on their Confluence Sandbox
- Arne Schirmacher has posted a live demo on his Confluence site
- Another live demo on my personal Confluence space (using 1.2-SNAPSHOT)
What next?
If you’re using this plugin or have tried it out, I’d really like to know what you think of it.
- What improvements would you like made?
- What reports are missing?
- Where could the UI could be improved?
Please post a comment if you’ve got it installed.
Thanks
I’d like to thank the Confluence community for their help mainly via Atlassian Forums and some Atlassians for helping me out when I got stuck – particularly Shaun Hare, Keith Brophy, Jonathan Nolen and David Peterson.
Image credit: Google Analytics icon
Belatedly announcing: Google Analytics plugin for Confluence
http://bit.ly/6ADN00 #atlassian
Would be useful if there were macro params to just show a specific graph (or output a table so I can wrap it in flot chart macro) – that way it could easily be used in portals, sidebars, etc.
Nice idea. It should be fairly straightforward to do, so I’ll look into it when I get the chance.
I’d also like to replace the {chart} based graphs as I think they are a bit weak — maybe with something like this flot example or something based on gRaphaël.
Google Analytics plugin for Confluence – NICE! Check it out – http://is.gd/5JYLZ Congrats to David Simpson.. Happy New Year!
Awesome! Just awesome! I will be referring many customers to this!
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Great job David! Looks very clean, simple to configure, simple to use. However, since Google Analytics needs access to your site, will this work for people who are running Confluence behind an firewall? Since Confluence is an Enterprise Wiki, alot of the user base is stuck using Confluence for an intranet. Is there anything that can be done to open up Confluence to Google Analytics?
Hi Brad,
David has answered this question in a previous post. Here was his answer:
Cheers,
Matt
In addition, if your client browsers can load the Google Analytics javascript (ga.js) but your Confluence server cannot access the internet, you’ll need to open a hole in your firewall (www.google.com on port 443) to allow the Confluence server to connect to the Google Analytics API.
A simple test would be:
Does your Confluence instance have access to the Plugin Repository to install plugins?
If yes, all is good your server can access the outside world.
If no, then back to the drawing board.
The plugin is throwing below ServiceException. I can view the statistics in my google account but not in the confluence page. Any thoughts?
com.google.gdata.util.ServiceException: Insufficient quota to proceed.
GData
<code>rateLimitExceeded</code>
Insufficient quota to proceed.
at com.google.gdata.client.http.HttpGDataRequest.handleErrorResponse(HttpGDataRequest.java:588)
Hi Vimal
It looks like you may have exceeded the quota policy for Google Analytics.
Maybe try again in 24 hours.
It didn’t make any difference after 24 hours. Is the quota limit based on our company domain or just each website profile on the google account?
Also, I tried from our test environment that has limited traffic to the site.. I enabled diagnostic mode and set com.google to TRACE level. I don’t find any error message, but still the plugin is not displaying the data. I can view the statistic from my google account. Is there any other way to debug the status of network connection in the plugin?
The issue was resolved. We had our own context defined for the confluence instance and the google analytics plugin is looking for /display directory as root directory for data search. Once we defined a custom filter in the google account to replace /context to /, the plugin is working as expected.
Hey, I just wanted to point out for others. Took us a little time to figure this one out.
If you aren’t getting any databack, it may be because you have a context root set.
We had a reverse proxy & a context root set. But your plugin assumes no context root and requests
^/display/[spacekey]
we added a filter on the google analytics side to replace our context root with a slash. Now we see data.
Steve, Vimal: Yes, version 1.1 assumes that the context path starts at root. My apologies if this has proved a problem. I’ll look into fixing it for release 1.2.
Looking further into Vimal’s error message, the plugin makes more than 10 calls to the Google API in one go.
The behaviour suggests that if the Google API finds no results, it is likely to execute more than 10 calls per second, exceeding the quota limit policy as seen by Vimal. If results are found, then then the quota limit is unlikely to be reached as it takes a little while for the results to be returned.
i am trying to test this out on our qa box which can access the internet through our firewall. I am getting a credential error that the account cannot authenticate. I am using my gmail account.
Any ideas.
I am trying to test this in our enviroment and when I go to configure the plugin I get a message that my account could not be authenticated. I spoke to our network dept and they said the Plugin was not proxy aware. Our wiki is proxy aware because the RSS feeds work without an issue.
Can you help?
Stacy: I’ll have a look and see whether I can get the plugin to use the standard Confluence proxy settings.
Incidentally, the installation at the University of Nottingham has the proxy set, so that the Confluence plugin repository will work — The Google Analytics plugin works fine with no proxy use.
Stacy: The plugin should pick up the proxy settings from the Confluence installation.
That said, the plugin connects to Google Analytics over HTTPS to these URLs:
https://www.google.com/analytics/feeds/accounts/default and https://www.google.com/analytics/feeds/data
So, try experimenting with the HTTPS proxy, e.g.
-Dhttps.proxyHost=proxy.example.org-Dhttps.proxyPort=8080
-Dhttp.nonProxyHosts=*.foo.com|localhost
[...] January 2, 2010 David Simpson | Announcing: Google Analytics plugin for Confluence [...]
Can you use this macro to display information for another wiki?
We have Google Analytics running on an external wiki, and want to be able to report the statistics (for internal use) on our internal wiki.
Jo: That should be just fine. A current limitation is that Confluence should be installed in the root directory – something I’m in the process of fixing.
I always try it out on our development wiki first. You just have to select a different Google Analytics account/website profile on the configuration page — give it a go and let me know how you get on.
Could you tell me please exactly which information is transferred from CONFLUENCE to GOOGLE ANALYTICS? Please let me know also if GOOGLE ANALYTICS (GA) can see insight our CONFLUENCE server (through remote access) and if GA has write access to our CONFLUENCE server.
Thanks in advance.
Patricia: Further to my previous response, here’s the data usage policy for the Analytics Plugin for Confluence.
Thanks a lot David! The given explanation is perfect.
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