Deploy OpenPanel, an open-source Google Analytics alternative, on xCloud in ten minutes using the one-click installer. Avoid GDPR and privacy issues by self-hosting, then connect your WordPress site with the KDE Tracking Connector plugin and serve tracking scripts locally for full compliance.
Chapters
In this video, I'm going to show you how to get Open Panel set up via a one-click install on xCloud. It's super simple and it solves a pretty important issue. Uh, we're looking here at the Open Panel website and it says right here, the open source alternative to Google Analytics, Amplitude, Mixpanel, and actually a bunch of other stuff. Now, the problem it solves is keeping good stats for your website, but avoiding issues with things like GDPR and HIPAA compliance. Storing your stats in Google Analytics can be a significant issue for those, those legal aspects. And maybe it's not just legal. Maybe you just want to be more private than that. So Open Panel is a great replacement for that. And it's really easy to get set up in xCloud. Let's take a look. So I'm going to show you 2 things. I'm going to show you how to set it up, but then I'm going to show you a setup that I already have running so that you can see the— that it's been collecting stats. So we're going to start right here. I have a server set up called Web Analytics, but we're not going to start there. We're going to start by saying I want a new site, and we go to One Click Apps, and we're up to 475 now. Uh, yesterday I made a video and I think it was 425, so new apps all the time. Check it out. So we're going to check out Open— got to be more precise— Open Panel right there, and I have 6 servers it could go on. They recommend a new server. I am going to go ahead and do that. So we'll do a new server and we'll give it a name, 2. There we go. Now this needs to be Docker for this to work. So that's the only option you have right there. I'm not going to do a tag. I'm going to choose the cheapest one. Now I pointed out that I have one already. If that one had been bigger and could run 2 instances of OpenPanel, I would've done that, but I'm choosing to run each on their own VPS. You can choose where you want it and pay and deploy. All right, I'm going to be right back after this server is done provisioning. All right. The server is set up and we're ready to go. So this is the server dashboard. We're going to go to the site list for this server and click right here. And there we are. You can create an account right here and dive right in. However, as I mentioned before, I'm going to switch from this one to the one that I set up the other day because It'll look, it'll look a lot more interesting. And here it is. Now, something you're going to want to do is go to Access Data Credentials. And here's your dashboard URL and your tracking API URL. You're going to need this in a little bit. But you're also going to need one more thing. So let's go to here. So if you had just created an account, you would log into a panel that looked a lot like this. And this is connected to heropress.com. And you can see I've had 18 unique visitors in the last 7 days. That's not quite true. I connected it yesterday. So 18 visitors since yesterday. And to connect it to your site, let me show you what you need. On your WordPress site, you're going to need to install a plugin to be able to connect to your OpenPanel install. And a mistake I made was getting the official OpenPanel plugin. That doesn't work because that works only with their hosted SaaS solution. What you need instead is this plugin called KDE Tracking Connector for OpenPanel, which allows you to put in your API URL self-hosted. So let me show you how to get this set up. I'm here in my Open Panel connection. We're going to go to settings and clients and API keys. So you need your client ID and you're going to put that right here. Your API URL. I learned actually that all you do is take the URL of your install and stick API at the end. But we're going to go back here. And as you— as I mentioned before, under credentials, it's right here. So we would copy that, paste it right there. Then here are some kind of important options. op1.js is the JavaScript magic that makes this all work, and you can choose to have it come from their servers, which gets you the latest version, etc. But it also makes you not as compliant with things like GDPR. So you have the option to serve it locally from your own server. And then you have all these options about what you're tracking, how it's tracked, all that stuff. So make sure you go through these and get them set up the way you want them and then save changes. And that's it. That's all I did is fill in those fields and it started tracking. Um, there's a bunch of dashboards, insights pages, real-time. Um, this is kind of real-time, but, uh, this gets you the cool bubbles. Google Analytics doesn't do this well anymore, and I miss that, but you get to see where people are. Right now, it's pretty great. It is open source. It's the software is free. You're paying for a VPS, of course, but I mean, that's the way it is with any software you want to run. And it took probably a total of 10 minutes, including 7 for the VPS configuration, to get this all set up. It's really simple, and it's available in a one-click install on xCloud. So. Give it a shot.
