I’ve been around the Analytics scene for a few years now, and one of the biggest hassles with tracking for really really big sites, or sites where security is a massive deal (online banking, etc), has been the need to tag all the pages (for javascript tracking), or to suffer with the limited info you get from web server logs.

The team from Coradiant, who include on their client list organisations like the FBI, have just pitched their new product, Analytics in a Box (AIB), which involves a box being installed on the inside of the Firewall (next to the web servers or load balancers). It then passively sniffs the network to see real time requests that clients make when loading web pages, submitting forms and the rest.

• No pages need to be tagged with Javascript.
• No access to the main web server logs is required.
• You just drop it into the datacentre, turn it on, and configure the filters.

This solution is bloody incredible. It harnesses the power of Google’s Urchin product to manage the reporting and viewing of reports, but it extends the fields that Urchin can gather and report on, including anything in the headers. This gives them the power to do things like report on the number of visitors who go half way through a download of a white paper but have their download cancel, something that until now is impossible with either Javascript or Log File Analysis.

And so very much more.

One of the most impressive products I’ve seen in the Analytics – specifically the very high end enterprise stuff at US$35K a for the integrated server, Urchin, MySQL licence and the agents that control the whole process – since Woopra.

If you’re looking for an analytics solution with no javascript and more information than you can get out of log files, this could be the solution you’ve been looking. As an Urchin reseller, we’re one of the few ways to get this product around the world: contact me at Internetrix for more info.