Guanoo
Guanoo is a collection of web data collection and analytics services written in Perl and other scripting languages. It runs on Linux, Mac OS X and Solaris with MySQL databases. It would be possible to run it on Windows with minor modifications.
X Perform
The first part of the Guanoo system is called "X Perform" where X is any web event. Most web events are page views, but the system is designed to measure a large number of events to be compatible with future subprojects such as measuring video, email, news feeds, etc.
The X Perform system works as follows:
- A web browser requests a measured web page on a web site
- Some JavaScript code in the measured page sends data to the X Perform web server
- The Apache web server logs details about the page view event
- A Perl process called "extractor.pl" reads events in the Apache log
- A Perl process called "transformer.pl" loads events into databases
Separately there are reporting programs (also written in Perl) to regularly generate detailed web traffic reports, which may be read directly from the MySQL database, or via XML/JSON web service API calls using REST. The web services API is written using Perl CGI because it's simple and it works.
