No. Logacity is a downloaded program that you install on your local machine/server. You're welcome to run it on your cloud provider of choice, but we leave that up to you, we don't force it on you.
There are a number of advantages to this:
Logacity analyses the server logs that your mapping service produces. By default, every time a user makes a request to your service, your server will be logging the request unless you have turned this off (which is uncommon). If you have a load-balancing proxy or similar between your service and your users, these logs can be read instead, providing an aggregate view of service usage.
Logacity can be configured to read logs in many different configurations and includes defaults for handling logs in both Common log format and Combined log format.
If you have a log format that you're not sure about, send us a sample and we'll test it for you. If it's not currently supported, we'll try add it to the list of formats that are supported.
Yes.
Logacity includes the MaxMind geocoding API - but because of the licensing, combined with the issue of keeping it up-to-date - Logacity doesn't come with the Geocoding database. This can be downloaded freely and easily directly from MaxMind (you'll need the MaxMind DB format).
Once the database has been integrated and enabled, Logacity then allows you to geocode to either the country or city level depending on which database you download.
Of course, this only works if your users are coming in from the internet; it won't provide any insights if they're all on your corporate network.
Logacity's results should be very accurate, but the full answer is a little more nuanced than that.
The advantage of analysing server-side logs is that they contain every request the service has ever received; this gives them a more complete picture than something client-side like Google Analytics which can only collect data for users who have JavaScript enabled in their browser and are not running an ad-blocker.
Furthermore, unlike standard server-log analysers, Logacity is only interested in mapping-service related requests. This means it can easily filter out spurious log entries (i.e. service attacks, bots, etc.) that are otherwise hard to deal with. Logacity does this by only keeping any analysis requests that are valid for one of the protocols it supports.
These things combined serve to make Logacity very accurate.
The downside to this method is that some requests for a mapping service may use the "POST" method - the contents of these requests aren't usually kept in the log files, and so Logacity won't be able to determine what the user was requesting. WFS requests are the most susceptible to this limitation.
We suggest once a night after midnight. This way the Log Viewer is always up-to-date for the users.
Very.
On a relatively standard PC, the Log Analyser component can process 5 million log entries in around 20 minutes, or about 4000 log entries per second. If you enable the geolocation component, this will increase to around 30 minutes.
On a daily basis, most services will only receive a small fraction of that number of requests.
The requirements can be found here.
Logacity currently has support for all of the below OGC mapping protocol/version combinations. Logacity will read any valid requests that your server has received for these, and convert it into the final analysis you see in the Viewer.
Logacity uses a standard SQLite database (for which there are many excellent and free database managers), and this combined with the simple, logical database schema means semi-technical and technical users can easily query the data directly to draw their own insights if they wish.
We're also open to requests for new views in the Logacity Viewer interface, so if you have something you want, just send us an email.
We're afraid not, but we've made it as close to that as we can and hope to make it Open Source in the future. Open Source (capital O, capital S) is a specific term meaning software released under certain permissive licenses. Because we place a restriction on distribution, Logacity isn't eligible for an Open Source license.
Logacity is open source though (small o, small s), meaning you can view and edit the source code as you desire, but not redistribute it in any way outside of your organisation. The actual license is here