I operate a number of content websites that have several million user sessions and need a reliable way to monitor some real-time metrics on particular pieces of content (key metrics being: pageviews/unique pageviews over time, unique users, referrers).
The use case here is for the stats to be visible to authors/staff on the site, as well as to act as source data for real-time content popularity algorithms.
We already use Google Analytics, but this does not update quickly enough (4-24 hours depending on traffic volume). Google Analytics does offer a real-time reporting API, but this is currently in closed beta (I have requested access several times, but no joy yet).
New Relic appears to offer a few analytics products, but they are quite expensive ($149/500k pageviews - we have several times this).
Other answers I found on StackOverflow suggest building your own, but this was 3-5 years ago. Any ideas?
Heard some good things about Woopra and they offer 1.2m page views for the same price as Relic.
https://www.woopra.com/pricing/
If that's too expensive then it's live loading your logs and using an elastic search service to read them to get he data you want but you will need access to your logs whilst they are being written to.
A service like Loggly might suit you which would enable you to "live tail" your logs (view whilst being written) but again there is a cost to that.
Failing that you could do something yourself or get someone on freelancer to knock something up for you enabling logs to be read and displayed in a format you recognise.
https://www.portent.com/blog/analytics/how-to-read-a-web-site-log-file.htm