How to use Netlify Analytics to track resource GET's?

Support
1

I’ve loved netlify so far, but just ran into a major problem for my use case.

I sell Mac apps. These apps check my website for updates by reading an xml file of available versions. I need analytics on that file to get an idea of how many people are actively using my apps.

I’ve subscribed to analytics, but still can’t get this information.

I’ve read a number of older support requests in these forums looking for a solution, and basically answer is that it is not possible. Workaround is to make a separate page request, but that won’t work for my case. Some users are already suspicious when an app “phones home” to read the versions xml file. A second request is worse, and shouldn’t be needed.

So my questions:

  1. Is there any workaround for tracking resource GET’s in netlify 2022?

  2. Is there a business reason these are not being provided? I understand that raw logs might be not easily shared, I just want resources to be treaded same as pages?

  3. If there’s not currently a workaround is there any hope that this will change in the near future. I really like the service, but this is a fundamental metric that I need to track.

Thanks for you response.

2

Hey @jessegrosjean,

Unfortunately this has still not changed. Analytics still tracks only HTML files. I can’t comment on business reasons as it’s the product team that makes these decisions, but there are open feature requests which track this issue.

3

@hrishikesh Disappointing, but thanks for your quick reply.

I will reiterate, I’ve loved almost everything about netlify (and am still using), but this is a painful limitation and seems unnecessary.

Here’s another way to look at it. I’m on free plan, because my website doesn’t have much traffic and my company is just me. The service does just want I want, it’s great.

Then I decide to actually pay for something, analytics. I was expecting to be wowed since your free service is so great, but analytics is underwhelming. It’s not just the lack of good tracking of GETs, traffic sources are also limited. For example I only see top 5 referrals and can’t seem to see more. Also there’s no keyword information or anything like that.

The end result is that the only thing that I’m paying for is also the only thing that’s pushing me away from Netlify. I’m not leaving at moment because rest of service is nice, but I’m not really a happy customer either.

I’m marking your reply as “solution” since forum system keeps emailing and insisting that I do. And your response was useful, thanks again. It’s a prompt answer to my question, but not a “solution” for me.