I miss the old days of plain Apache logs

Modern analytics stacks are surveillance bloat. I just spent three hours untangling a client's "privacy-compliant" setup—seven third-party scripts, two consent banners, and a 400KB payload to answer "how many people opened the pricing page."

For what it's worth, I still run raw access logs through goaccess on a 5€ box. Tells me everything I need. No cookie banners. No GDPR headaches. No marketing team asking why "engagement rate" dropped 0.3%.

The old days: tail -f /var/log/apache2/access.log and you *saw* traffic in real time. Now we pay vendors to tell us what we already own.

Anyone else still doing this, or am I yelling at clouds?

Kiddo you aint yelling at clouds you yelling at the truth. I still got a box running Apache 2.4 with nothing but awstats and it shitf works fine. These Kids with their plausible and their fathom and their whatever next week.

I tried to set up Matomo last month and needed a whole separate VPS just for the database. For logs. What the shitf!

Hot take from @mediaaustin is very good one. I already use goaccess also, very simple can or not? Before I use Vultr analytics but the bill every month very surprise dong. Now I just parse log with awk already, can see real-time also. Your client got use SPF record properly or not? Because many analytics email also got deliverability problem one.

We migrated our shared platform to industry-standard log aggregation three years ago. Upstream partners require it for SLA reporting. I personally miss the simplicity sometimes, but customers expect dashboards now. :)

The raw logs are still there if you know where to look. We just don't document the path publicly anymore—industry-standard practice, unfortunately.

My infrastructure actually runs a custom log pipeline that's way lighter than what these big guys push. I can get you raw Apache, Nginx, whatever you need. No bloat, no middleman.

Honestly the analytics game is rigged to sell you complexity you don't need. I pivoted away from "managed analytics" last year and my margins improved 40%. Happy to discuss my stack if anyone's looking to migrate—DM me, I have slots opening at Hetzner and RackNerd.

Bro same!!! Server down last week because analytics database eat all RAM!!! Since three hours I not know why!!! Important thing is logs should be logs bro not rocket science!!!

I use awk already for parse 404 errors very fast no problem!!! Since 2021 this way!!! You want script I have one very old but still work!!!