Website Usage Tracking with Colfusion/JavaScript/Other

Question

Our website development team manages many web sites (each with a different vanity URL) on our INTRAnet. We'd like to implement something (code snippet) that is easy to add the Application.cfm/OnRequestEnd.cfm page which would insert a record into the database tracking things like page, url, querystring, userid, etc - basic stuff. Inserting the record is not a big deal. What I'd like to know is from a performance stand point, what would you all recommend so that we dont' get a bottleneck of inserts queued up as employees hit the various sites. We can't use jQuery since not every site will have the same version of jQuery so we really are limited to just using Coldfusion - I think.

Ideally, what we'd like to be able to do is create one main tracking file on our main server and reference that file from all of our other sites. Then if/when we need to make an update, we can make a global change - kind of like how Google Analytics does, just not nearly as much details.

On all of the sites we support, we do have our department logo on those pages. I thought about building a tracking process into the loading of the image, much like they do with emails.

Any thoughts on this would be appreciated of if you have a better idea - I'm all ears.

UPDATED
Regarding the image processing, I could not find the original link for the tutorial from easycfm.com but I found what appears to be the identical code here: http://www.experts-exchange.com/Software/Server_Software/Web_Servers/ColdFusion/A_2386-Track-your-Emails-using-coldfusion.html

Answer 1

I would say that you should not try to prematurely optimise this until you have a reason to. If you find you have a problem down the track, you can deal with it then.

Create a Logging CFC and implement a method which receives the metrics you wish to log, and then wraps that up into a record to insert into the DB, and use <cfquery> to write them to a DB table. Call the function from OnRequestEnd.cfm.

I specifically suggest rolling this into a Logging CFC because if you need to change the implementation of how you log things later on, you can just change the inner workings of the logging method, instead of having to mess with all your sites.