September 22, 2008

Web analytics — clickstream and network event data

It should surprise nobody that web analytics – and specifically clickstream data — is one of the biggest areas for high-end data warehousing. For example:

But what surprised me a bit was to discover that clickstream data is joined at the hip to more general network event data. I hadn’t heard much about that until recently. But over the past month or so, Greenplum, Aster, Vertica, Coral8, and some very big users have all told me the same thing:

Where there’s clickstream data, there’s usually also network event data – and the latter is in even higher volumes.

It’s obvious what one does with clickstream data (or at least what one tries to do — current web analytics are still highly primitive, for reasons I’ll lay out in another post). But what one does with network event data is a little murkier, and how one integrates clickstream and network event data is very unclear. I hear phrases like “All that TIBCO data is just falling on the floor,” from users and vendors alike. (Come to think of it, I’ve heard that exact phrasing from one vendor and one user, and the user is that vendor’s biggest customer … coincidence?) I hear the general sentiment that network event data is useful for optimizing network operations. But I haven’t gotten a lot more detail than that. Vertica did mention some network event management VARs – e.g., OpenService and nMetrics are on Vertica’s customer list – but I got the sense those might be network event management pure plays, not outfits looking at the integration of clickstream and network data.

The one clear application message I’ve gotten so far for clickstream/network event integration came from Coral8. The idea is:

Of course, coming from Coral8, that was a real-time story. But it seems as if similar scenarios would make sense on a data warehousing basis as well.

Comments

2 Responses to “Web analytics — clickstream and network event data”

  1. Database compression is heavily affected by the kind of data | DBMS2 -- DataBase Management System Services on September 22nd, 2008 6:21 am

    […] Greenplum’s customer getting 7.5X — high for a row-based system — is managing clickstream data and related stuff. Bottom […]

  2. Oracle is integrating clickstream and network analytics too | DBMS2 -- DataBase Management System Services on September 23rd, 2008 2:15 pm

    […] I’m reading things correctly, add Oracle to the already long list of vendors who see clickstream and network event analytics as being two sides of the same coin. Share: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where […]

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