Omniture & Fedora

[Jesse Eversole Jr]

Sure,

Omniture uses what I call a "client side" tracking technique using 
javascript to dynamically markup an image tag with a query string and 
fetch that image from Omniture's servers sending data to them via the 
query string.  Google and Yahoo offer similar services with less 
sophisticated features, but the approach is effectively the same.  The 
data is stored on Omniture's servers and available for reporting in near 
real time especially when it comes to basic traffic data.  It is 
probably important to note that Omniture and awstats are not mutually 
exclusive.  One is server based and the other runs on the webpage 
sending data to a hosted platform.

I would have to dig into details to completely expose what our license 
agreement with Omniture is as is applies to the usage of their software 
since is a service that we buy from them.  Omniture is more akin to 
Salesforce.com and Google Analytics. 

To get started with the base functionality of Omniture you drop in some 
javascript, hopefully in a header or footer, and a few minutes later you 
can login to your account and start looking at traffic reports.  
Omniture has many sophisticated features one of which has the interest 
of Red Hat in response to your comment about Red Hat's needs relating to 
Fedora.  We have the capability with Omniture to do cross-domain path 
analysis.  That is, we can gain much deeper insight into the 
relationship between the two or more sites from tracking cross site 
browsing behavior.  We can track visitor paths across multiple sites 
including our international sites.  This extends beyond simple entry and 
exit page analysis.  The data is rich and the reporting interface 
powerful to the extent that it takes some time to explore all the 
different capabilities should the Fedora community wish to use Omniture 
for some of its own reporting.

We have been asked by the JBoss folks to setup jboss.org and I am 
currently working with that group to outfit jboss.org.  It is almost a 
cut and paste task into a header template for basic tracking and you are 
welcome to sit in (with my management's approval of course) on that 
deployment and post deployment reporting.  The decision as to whether 
deploying a piece of javascript code on a fedora.org page supplied by 
Red Hat using a Red Hat funded hosting service like Omniture is in 
conflict with Fedora's core mission in my opinion clearly belongs to the 
Fedora community. 

Thanks,

Jesse

Jesse Keating wrote:
> On Thu, 28 Feb 2008 16:01:48 -0500
> Jesse Eversole Jr <jeversol at redhat.com> wrote:
>
>   
>> Anyone who would like to know more about how our website tracking 
>> infrastructure works please feel free to contact me. It suffices to
>> say that you will find it far superior to awstats having been a user
>> of awstats in the past.
>>     
>
> Hi Jesse.  The question of superiority isn't interesting.  Fedora is
> very very committed to doing what it needs to get done using completely
> opensource products when possible.  (I say when possible to avoid
> derailed discussions about PC bioses and router firmwares)
>
> The reality is that Fedora itself would not make use of any thing that
> Omniture may learn from our site.  We're doing just fine with awstats,
> and anything we feel is missing from awstats we'd work with the
> upstream to provide that functionality.
>
> However, if Red Hat as a corporation feels that they need to gather
> some information about the Fedora websites, and that information is
> only available through Omniture, and getting data to Omniture is only
> possible through runtime java scripts, that's something else to discuss.
>
> Can you explain what the java scripts are, how they work, what license
> they're under, etc..?
>
>