Developing an Analytics Platform for Microsoft .NET

A few weeks ago, I posted an article on a proposed new approach to analytics. I argued that we needed a new paradigm for analytics that goes beyond the static page analysis model found in major engines such as WebTrends, Google Analytics, etc.

So this weekend I started designing one in .NET and now have a pretty decent tracking model. I started with an article I found on .NET and tracking. I took Vikram's basic ideas and expanded them a little bit to add some more general concepts.

The basic architecture looks like this:



The terminology on the diagram comes from Domain Driven Design by Eric Evans.

I've tried developing this as a pretty basic framework and made it as light as possible so that if my site gets a lot it won't take a lot of a) memory or b) load to persist the data. But the architecture achieves what I wanted to achieve, namely it allows me to save event data based on userid, sessionid and affiliate referrer and to specify the nature of those events based on programming events (e.g. a transaction happening in the business domain) instead of simply tracking a logged URL.

Once the data is logged, we will design a data-mart that will suck the data out of the log and process it into some decent OLAP cubes for reporting purposes.

If you want to send me feedback on the ideas, please feel free to leave your comments...