Add optional reverse DNS lookups for IP addresses

We’ve just begun using Piwik on our intranet, and it’s a great product. We’re very impressed with it.

In particular, the Live plugin is very cool. It would be great to be able to add the result of an inverse DNS lookup alongside the IP address when we hover over the “more…” link.

This could be a more general feature as well, implemented throughout Piwik. In intranet settings it’s especially useful to have the computer name, not just the IP, of each visitor. This has the potential to create a lot of DNS traffic and server load, but caching could help ameliorate this.

This should appear in the Visitors > Providers report.

It would indeed be very useful to have a reverse DNS lookup on every visitor’s IP address, because the reverse DNS of IP numbers (human readable form) from some companies, institutions, universities might reveal more information about the department the IP number is used in. Reverse DNS is especially important if most traffic originates from within the same company, institution, university. The “Visitor > Providers” report only gives information about the network (WHOIS) the IP address originates from.

You can install the Maxmind ISP database for more info: How to - Analytics Platform - Matomo

Optionally the hostname of the visitor’s IP could be obtained with “Reverse DNS”.

http://php.net/manual/en/function.gethostbyaddr.php

Found out PiWik actually does gethostbyaddr() in the “Visitor - Location & Providers - Providers”
list, but it cuts down the hostname to only give the provider. The point is in many cases I would
want to know the full hostname.

Why not do a WHOIS lookup to find the provider of a given IP? Might be “Reverse DNS” is quicker than
a WHOIS query. However the data returned with a WHOIS lookup might be processed to obtain much
more information on the ISP.