What I would like to do is find out how browser and device usage breaks down across a range of hundreds of sites. Which browsers are people using, what devices, screen sizes, that kind of thing, just not per site.
I’m not even finding out if this is possible.
Is there a way to do this in the admin, or am I going to have to go directly to the database.
With some scripting you could use the reporting API and loop through all the site IDs. For example to get all the browsers used last year and get them in JSON format:
https://yourmatomoinstance/index.php?module=API&method=DevicesDetection.getBrowsers&idSite=1&period=year&date=previous1&format=JSON&token_auth=your_API_token
With a script you can repeatedly visit this URL and only change the “idSite=1” part. You’ll need additional scripting to stitch all the JSON responses together so you can total them. I personally use python with pandas, json and requests for making the https requests and manipulating the responses.
On the other hand if you are more experienced with SQL than with python or other scripting/programming languages you can probably get the same information directly from the DB as well and much faster.
Great! Thanks for letting me know!