It is often extremely helpful to measure user behavior in order to evaluate strengths and weaknesses of your user interface, your indexing rules and your underlying collection.

VuFind offers several options for collecting usage statistics.

The [Statistics] section of config.ini allows you to configure VuFind to collect basic record view and search data into one or more of the following places:

• A MySQL database table
• A Solr index
• A file on disk

Reports on this data can be generated in VuFind's administration module; some targets support more detailed reports than others (with “file on disk” offering the fewest options).

VuFind's built-in statistics mechanism is not designed to handle large volumes of data, and its use is not recommended except for short-term, limited testing. The third-party statistics options offer much more robust functionality.

Google Analytics is a very popular hosted solution for gathering site statistics. VuFind offers out-of-the-box GA support through the [GoogleAnalytics] section of config.ini.

Piwik is an open source project which offers similar functionality to Google Analytics but allows the data to be collected to a locally-hosted server rather than a third-party service. For libraries with concerns about privacy and applications of user-generated data, this may be a preferred option. The [Piwik] section of config.ini allows simple integration with a Piwik server.