I haven't seen too many reviews out there for DeepMetrix's new product, LiveStats.NET, and I believe I know why.  I've got to believe that they're terribly embarrassed by it, and hope that no one notices that they've got a new product until they've had a chance to make a few updates.

What's so horrible?  Well, let me explain how their LiveStats.NET works.  On the servers being tracked, a piece of JavaScript inserted into every page served calls home to the tracking server, requesting a 1K GIF.  LiveStats then reads the log of the server hosting the .GIF file, and tracks stats accordingly.  The problems arise when you think about how you can insert all that JavaScript.

Option #1 is to manually do it.  Even DeepMetrix realized that was a bad idea, so they give you the other 2 options.  Option #2 is to use of of their 3 automatic JS embedders (or, as they say, “embeders“... the typos are thorough and throughout), either their custom tool, or two they developed for DreamWeaver or FrontPage.  I can't speak to how useful they are... I can't imagine doing this to any existing web content.  Option #3 seemed the most appealing to me, installing their IIS ISAPI filter to insert the JS on every call manually.  It works as advertised, kinda.

You see, after its finished inserting all the JavaScript, the filter seems to have a need to have one more HTML comment closing tag.  Not a big deal, except the developers left off one of the dashes in “-->”  So, best case, you have a small arrow printed at the top of every web page served.  At worst, you get a bunch on a single page.  I'm not exactly sure how such things get by QA... maybe they hoped no one would notice.

I noticed.

The next big bug I found almost makes me think they are trying to cut off any corporate customers that they have.  When setting up a new website to track, you need to enter a fully-qualified domain name for it... no single-name servers like you would find on a corporate LAN (i.e. companyweb).  The same applies to the server aliases... FQDNs only need apply.  Well, that's not entirely true... IP addresses are OK too; anything with a dot I guess.

I haven't bothered to actually use the reporting aspect of LiveStats.Net, because I can't.  I haven't any public websites to point to, and nobody uses FQDNs in their browser for the internal sites.  That's right - the configuration is so broken, the product is 100% unusable.

I'd give them 0 stars, but I don't think that's fair... I spent a good chunk of my day trying to get it to work.  If you find another review for it out there, let me know... I'd like to take away a few of the stars from them there.

- G