Archiving tracking info for import into a Piwik server that is offline

I am not able to setup a Piwik server that users can access in production due to system requirements (Microsoft stack).

I would like to setup the client-side JavaScript and a reimplementation of the server-side endpoint to collect all the information which I would later feed into a Piwik server running in my dev environment.

Any pointers to anyone already doing this, any existing formats/mechanisms for bulk import/export of Piwik events, and/or what I would need to do for the endpoint reimplementation?

Microsoft stack: Piwik should work perfectly on Microsoft IIS stack.

Thanks matt; the ‘Microsoft stack’ part I’m stuck on is SQL Server 2005.

I would like to setup something in production to archive just the event data, then import that into Piwik setup somewhere else to take advantage of all the reporting optoins.

You can simply use the JavaScript tracker and log all tracking requests to your server. Then use the log-importer to import the logs into Piwik: Log Analytics - Analytics Platform - Matomo

Thanks Fabian, this seems like a good first step.

Ultimately I would prefer to have all the information available normally rather than as limited by that which can be extracted from the log files. I was hoping there was already some side channel available for transporting it to another system.

You still have all the information available if you log the tracking requests to piwik.php. Simply put the JavaScript snippet on your website and place an empty piwik.php file at the location where the snippet is pointing. Log these requests and import them to Piwik.

Great! I was confused because of this in the documentation:

Tracking cookies cannot be used resulting in a few missing data points[/url]. See also [url=http://piwik.org/faq/troubleshooting/#faq_50]this faq.

[ul]
[li] Piwik will still be able to determine unique visitors based on IP address and other footprints, but this will be slightly less accurate.
[/li][li] Ecommerce and Goal tracking attribution
[/li][li] Reports such as “Days since last visit”, “Visits by visit count”, “Visits to Conversion”, “Days to Conversion” will count all visits without cookie similarly to new visitors.
[/li][/ul]

There are two ways of using the log-import:

  1. Using raw access.log (without installing the JavaScript tracker)
  2. Logging all calls to piwik.php (by installing the JavaScript tracker)

The second one is the one you want. You will want to use the --replay-tracking parameter (https://github.com/piwik/piwik/blob/master/misc/log-analytics/import_logs.py#L380)