Thanks! If you do end up "orange clouding" and proxying your site through Cloudflare, we can show you lots of stats about your website, even from clients that don't support JS :)
> But in their case it seems they are not even trying to filter bots
We try very hard in fact :) We just have some work ahead to surface this better in our analytics UI.
For more detail: we actually assign a "bot score" to each request. Customers customers of our Bot Management product can use this information to block bots at the edge. We are working right now to show the distribution of Bot traffic in the UI so that anyone can see how we are classifying traffic.
Hi, I'm the product manager for Cloudflare Analytics. Thanks for this thorough and thoughtful review.
We are totally serious about building a world-class, privacy-first, free analytics product. At risk of HN cliche, this is our "early work". We are actively working to fix many of the rough edges mentioned here; if we had waited to fix all of them before shipping, we never would have shipped!
For folks who haven't seen it, I suggest checking out our launch blog post[0] which gives some more context around edge vs browser analytics (spoiler: we do both!), why we count visits the way we do, and how we handle bot traffic.
We know we have work to do on the "jagged lines" problem. For some low-traffic websites, we might show noisier, low-resolution data than is ideal. (We've artificially constrained our analytics to query a maximum of 7 days at a time because this problem is exacerbated with longer time ranges.)
My colleague Jamie wrote a nice blog post about how and why we sample data [1]. In short: we have an existing customer base of 25 million+ Internet priorities, whose traffic volume spans 9 orders of magnitude! Sampling data is an elegant approach that allows us to serve fast, flexible analytics for all our customers. Sampling shouldn't be feared, but we know we can do better in some cases. We've recently merged some deep-in-the-weeds improvements to ClickHouse [2] that should result in improved resolution. And we're currently working to store full-resolution data for the smallest websites.
Happy to address any other specific points that folks have questions about.
More coming soon!
Happy to chat more - jpl at cloudflare dot com