Adverity is particularly useful if there is a large range of data sets that you want to combine to get an 'overall' view. Previously we had used Google Analytics, but found that this was too useful for our big client accounts that we were working on. So I think that if there is an individual who is responsible for analytics or data, and also a paid media team then this is a tool which is essential. For companies that have limited activity then I think this tool could potentially over-complicate for less reward.
There are no special resources needed to use Clicky - it works well for all the sites I've used it on, providing up to date metrics on visitors and actions. It started out as analytics particularly suited to bloggers and it's still very strong there, but I believe it can work in a wide range of scenarios.
As I mentioned earlier SQL Server Integration Services is suitable if you want to manage data from different applications. It really helps in fetching the data and generating reports. Its automation make it very easy and time efficient. It works well with large database as well. But it doesn't work well with real time data, it will take some time to gather the real time data. I would not recommend using it in a real time/fast-paced environment.
It's hard to find a negative feature about Clicky, but if I must pick one, it would be the fact that some reports are only available for limited periods, which means you can't get a one year overview of all aspects of your site. That's just nitpicking, though, as what Clicky offers is more than enough for most people.
Connection managers for online data sources can be tricky to configure.
Performance tuning is an art form and trialing different data flow task options can be cumbersome. SSIS can do a better job of providing performance data including historical for monitoring.
Mapping destination using OLE DB command is difficult as destination columns are unnamed.
Excel or flat file connections are limited by version and type.
In addition to the factors already mentioned, Clicky is constantly being updated to improve functionality for users and the development team is extremely responsive. Recent updates include enhanced support for HTML5 audio and video tracking, additional visitor detail and new comparison trends. In my opinion, Clicky just keeps getting better
Some features should be revised or improved, some tools (using it with Visual Studio) of the toolbox should be less schematic and somewhat more flexible. Using for example, the CSV data import is still very old-fashioned and if the data format changes it requires a bit of manual labor to accept the new data structure
Very good and organized data. Easy to use and good at communicating. Rarely run into problems and they are good at explaining when problems arise due to others api issues. Good notes and guides on how to use and very easy user interface to help there clients use there site.
SSIS is a great tool for most ETL needs. It has the 90% (or more) use cases covered and even in many of the use cases where it is not ideal SSIS can be extended via a .NET language to do the job well in a supportable way for almost any performance workload.
SQL Server Integration Services performance is dependent directly upon the resources provided to the system. In our environment, we allocated 6 nodes of 4 CPUs, 64GB each, running in parallel. Unfortunately, we had to ramp-up to such a robust environment to get the performance to where we needed it. Most of the reports are completed in a reasonable timeframe. However, in the case of slow running reports, it is often difficult if not impossible to cancel the report without killing the report instance or stopping the service.
The support, when necessary, is excellent. But beyond that, it is very rarely necessary because the user community is so large, vibrant and knowledgable, a simple Google query or forum question can answer almost everything you want to know. You can also get prewritten script tasks with a variety of functionality that saves a lot of time.
The implementation may be different in each case, it is important to properly analyze all the existing infrastructure to understand the kind of work needed, the type of software used and the compatibility between these, the features that you want to exploit, to understand what is possible and which ones require integration with third-party tools
Previously I had never really used a tool like this, only using software such as GA to look at any insights and review performance. So I think that the combined view of having all of the data sets (Which in my role I wouldn't always particularly have access to), was really useful. As an individual who was optimising our clients websites it meant that I was really able to prioritise what was important, but also have a great view of absolutely all activity that was happening
I think SQL Server Integration Services is better suited for on-premises data movement and ADF is more suited for the cloud. Though ADF has more connectors, SQL Server Integration Services is more robust and has better functionality just because it has been around much longer
Adverity has saved hundreds of man hours per month in reporting and data aggregation. I can think of no solution we've onboarded that has saved so much human capital expense for so little effort in setup and maintenance.
Over the 7 years I've used it, Clicky has given me a better understanding of where my main visitors are coming from, contributing for example to a decision to create content in US English rather than my native UK English because most visitors are from the US.
Clicky provided real time stats when few others were doing so, enabling me to respond more quickly to visitors interacting with my content.
Without this, we would have to manually update a spreadsheet of our SQL Server inventory
We would also have poor alerting; if an instance was down we wouldn't know until it was reported by a user
We only have one other person who uses SQL Server Integration Services , he's the expert. It would fall to me without him and I would not enjoy being responsible for it.
