Matomo on AWS: Intranet Analytics Success Story

The Summary

The client is a leading customized digital workplace solutions provider based in California. They provide companies worldwide with SharePoint, Office 365, Intranet Analytics, digital workspaces, and modern office solutions.Intranet analytics are used to measure the effectiveness in meeting employees' needs, identify areas for improvement, and make data-driven decisions. The client wanted a reliable platform with high performance, low cost, and enhanced security to provide real-time reports.

The Challenges

The customer was looking for a platform to efficiently track user engagement.

User Engagement: Understanding user behavior through analytics to increase collaboration between intranet users
Content Popularity: Tracking metrics like the number of views, shares, and comments on specific pages or documents.
Search Analytics: Metrics on searches performed, keywords used, and click-through rate of search results.
Dashboards: Create custom dashboards with usage patterns, user flows and paths, and activity heat maps for detailed, actionable insights.

The Arystech Solution

To address the client's problems, we deployed Matomo (formerly Piwik), an open-source web analytics software platform on AWS to provide a scalable and reliable platform for intranet analytics. Arystech chose AWS as the cloud service provider to host the solution.

We deployed the Matomo application on EC2 instances across multiple availability zones (AZs), running behind an application load balancer to distribute incoming traffic while providing high-availability and fault-tolerance.

Arystech selected AWS Relational Database Service (RDS), MySQL, in the Multi-Availability Zone And used parameter groups to tune the performance. Matomo is a data-intensive application and the performance is tied to the database server performance.

We enabled database session storage and synced config.ini.php on the servers behind the load balancer and forwarded the source IP address to the web servers.

The lightweight web server Nginx was selected for performance and scalability over traditional web servers.

Observed that PHP7.x provides substantial performance improvements and comes with PHP Cache.

AWS CertificateManager enables you to provision, manage, and deploy SSL/TLS certificates forusage with AWS services and internal resources.

AWS WAF is a web application firewall that helps protect online applications and APIs from typical web exploits and bots that may compromise their availability,security, and excessive resource consumption.

The Benefits

By using Matomo on AWS, the client gained valuable insights into visitor behavior and identified areas of the intranet to improve design, navigation, and content, resulting in overall user engagement.
We enabled the client to offer its growing customer base a reliable, scalable, and high-performing analytics platform.
The ability to view insights into visitor behavior allowed the client to understand their customers better and tailor their products and services to meet their needs.
The client can onboard new customers without manually scaling the infrastructure to handle additional traffic.
Matomo is designed to comply with data privacy regulations by anonymizing IP addresses and controlling cookies.

Why AWS?

Running Matomo on AWS provides several benefits for organizations looking to use the platform for internet analytics.

Scalability: AWS provides a highly scalable infrastructure that can handle large amounts of data and traffic. This was useful as clients accessed analytics data at any given time.

Reliability: AWS provides a highly available infrastructure to ensure the Matomo installation is always running. This is very important for organizations that rely on analytics data to improve user experience.

Cost-effectiveness: AWS provides a cost-effective pay-as-you-go pricing model that helps the customer reduce the cost of running the application.

Security: AWS provides a range of security features and services that help protect the Matomo installation and data from unauthorized access, data breaches, and other security threats.

About Arystech

As an AWS Services partner, we are proficient in delivering cloud and enterprise IT solutions, bringing efficiency across complex business environments. With over twenty years in technology consulting and ten years in the cloud, we have developed deep expertise in providing cloud solutions to drive customer value.

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