This week marks a personal milestone for my involvement in the Drupal community; I’ve published my first community contributed module, Gaugesapp. This simple module allows for easy integration with Gaug.es, a real-time web analytics tool. Thanks to the work of kepford, the module is available for both Drupal 6 and 7.

Gaug.es itself is a product of Ordered List, a web group whose claims to fame includes infrustructure work on Word with Friends, site design for Slicehost and AtMail, and has done some really interesting work with CMS administration UX with their product HarmonyApp.

Gaug.es itself has an incredibly polished interface. It’s very easy to navigate around and to examine the traffic received for your sites. They keep track of most of your basic stats that a site manager would be interested in: number of people and visits, screen/browser size, location of visitors, where they went on your site, referers, etc. As a longtime user of Google Analytics and a one-time user of Omniture in a previous life, the simplicity of the interface is a Godsend.

One place where Gaug.es distinguishes itself from Google Analytics is it’s realtime tracking ability. Unlike Google Analytics, results show up in realtime in Gaug.es. They even have a killer display for tracking users in realtime called “AirTraffic Live,” which converts the entire screen into a giant map with pinpoints popping up whenever someone new is tracked.

As neat as Gaug.es is itself, there are some pretty serious downsides to the app as well. There isn’t much analytic data to speak of outside of the basics, and the admin doesn’t allow for mining that data in any meaningful way like you can do with other analytic tools. In fact, as far as I can tell, there isn’t any way to get your data out of Gaug.es outside of the web interface. For a paid app like Gaug.es, this is unexcusable. Until some sort of data export (or even better, an API) is available, I wouldn’t rely on Gaug.es alone for any serious analyic needs.

Overall, Gaug.es is definitely worth checking out, especially if your analytics needs don’t extend much outside of the realm of ego boosting and informed browser support decisions.

Pros

• Live-data
• Simple, clean interface
• Has all the basics you’d expect from analytics
• AirTraffic feature (live data + map) display - very sweet

Cons

• Paid only (Needs free-mium)
• Only the basics, admin isn’t as flexible as other tools available (Omniture, Google Analytics)
• No data export?!?!?!
• No API