I’ve been using Umami analytics on this blog for quite some time now. I self host an instance on my homelab. I spent a bit of time researching self-hosted analytics and generally they had a few issues.

First, I’d like the analytics platform to be privacy focused. No cookies, GDPR compliant, no PII. Umami checks this mark.

Second, many of the alternatives had quite a bit of hardware resource overhead once hosted. They would either consume a ton of memory, the cpu usage would be high or require me to host something like ClickHouse to run them. Since this blog is not the new york times I feel like hosting a specific database for it would be overkill. My homelab is rather small, so keeping things minimal is how I manage to stretch it. Umami consumes around 1% of a CPU core and ~240MiB of RAM on my homelab.

Third, postgres as the datastore. Postgres is my go to database, and I host tons of small tools that use it as the backend. I like having a single instance that can then be easily backed up & restored, without having to resort to a ton of different databases. Therefore, any analytics tool would have to use it.

Fourth, the tracking script should be minimal in size, not to affect load times too badly. The blog itself is pretty lightweight, so any tracking script bloat would defeat that. The Umami script has a content lenght of 1482 bytes once gzipped, not too shabby.

Generally, I’ve been happy with the choice. However, there is one thing in Umami that annoys me more than it probably should: the visit timer. Apparently, the visit time is only updated once a user navigates to another page on the blog. If they simply leave, there’s no visit duration stored whatsoever. This makes the visit time tracker completely useless. I’m not the first one to notice this but the issue has since been moved to a discussion which has seen no progress.

Good news is there’s a few things one could do - perhaps add a custom event to track this? Or fork Umami, since it’s open source and fix it. Both of these fall strictly into my “can’t be arsed to do” category, so I guess it’s not that important.

Thanks for reading! Perhaps there are other analytics tools that tick the boxes above? Let me know in the comments below.