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Asked: 2026-05-26T09:11:09+00:00

I’m looking for a method to see how often people use my application and

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I’m looking for a method to see how often people use my application and some small usage stats about that usage, e.g. Time Of Day (derived from the message time), duration of usage (program statistic), etc.

The application is written in Java and already connects to the internet, so I know I can send/request information from websites.

My question, is how best to do this? I know I could use Google Analytics and “ping” a specific web page, but ideally I’d like the extra statistics too, can that be done with GA? How do I separate that traffic out of the other GA stats?

Are there existing code snippets I could utilise?

What do I need the server to do? I have hosting with SSH access, MySQL, etc. So can install packages if needed.

Edited to add

This is not a web application, it’s a local program that runs on a client machine and connects to the internet to gather data. So there’s no web pages that I can insert java code or other scripts into for true web analytics.

This is why I was thinking that I would have to “ping” or “poke” (No idea what the correct terms are) a specific web address, perhaps a PHP page that would record the statistics.

The statistics that I would like to gather are:

  • IP Address (ONLY to determine the unique visitor and perhaps country of origin)
  • Time of execution (from the time the statistic was generated)
  • Number of items processed (program statistic)
  • Execution duration (program generated statistic)

As the program is usually run by the user an average of once per day, I don’t anticipate massive load on the server (famous last words!)

Edited for clarification

The application is a CLI based (no GUI or web browser, web server, or other web application technologies are used). The application runs locally on a user’s machine, collects information on various files, downloads information on those files from the internet (yes, using a URL connection), and compiles that information into a database.

I have no view of or access to, the users of the application. I do have a website that I use Google Analytics to see who visits and where from, all the usually stats.

I want to be able to capture a small bunch of stats (explained above) each time the application is run so I know that the application is being used and by how many users and what for.

I had thought I might be able to call a PHP web page with some arguments that could then be added to a database, e.g. http://omertron.com/stats?IP=192.168.2.0|processed=23|duration=270

Or can Google Analytics be used to log that information some how? I can’t find much in the documentation about how I would do that.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Your options are:

    With tagging you create an account with Google Analytics and add some specific JavaScript code you will get from Google, into the relevant places of your code, this allows the browser of your visitors to connect to GA and get captured there.

    The Access log file can hold all information about all sessions. There is a lot of detail data generated, so data has to be Extracted, Transformed and Loaded (ETL) to a database. The evaluation can be then performed in nearly real-time. You can create some dashboard application that does the ETL and displays the status of you application.

    A third option would be to combine tagging and log file analysis. This will give you more precise results.

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