Piwik is running!

Changes made to the ProF application

The ProF application has been adapted so that it uses Piwik to track the behaviour of users. The adaptations we made were the following:

• In the configuration of a ProF instance we store the URL for the Piwik tracking and  the site id. This makes it possible to set up a separate Piwik per ProF instance.  Only if this configuration is made, ProF uses Piwik to track.

• We took care of putting all get-parameters needed for navigation in the same order on all pages. Piwik uses the complete URL to recognize pages.

• We defined a set of user variables that are sent to Piwik at each tracking event: the user id, the user authorisation (student, staff), the institution, and some more.

• We forced Piwik to use new cookies every day per user in order to be able to separate sessions of different users on the same machine.

Security and privacy enhancement

All communication with our installation of Piwik is through a secure HTTPS connection.  Moreover, the piwik console and API are only reachable from a restricted set of IP addressess. The tracking API must be accessible to all users of ProF. The user id we send to Piwik is not recognisable for anybody that would still be able to eavesdrop: it is an internal database id. Only with the help of the original database, the id can be translated to a student number.  We implemented a possibility to set an opt-out flag for each separate user.

Logging

We use the API of Piwik to download a log-file in XML format. Piwik offers a nice dashboard and many different reports, but for our analysis purposes we are going to use the setting "&method=Live.getLastVisitsDetails&format=XML". This format can be translated one-to-one into the XES format needed for process mining in PROM.