Page impressions from multiple publish servers

Hi,

I'm wondering if anybody has any strategies / experience using CQ's inbuilt analytics (ie impressions) from multiple publish servers.

In CQ deployments I've been involved in, we've used 'external' analytics and the client's custom templates have not included '/libs/foundation/components/page/stats.jsp'. However, I'd like to understand if I'm missing something here...

If the stats were collected on each of the publish servers, there doesn't seem to be any mechanism for automatically aggregating them back on the author server (which would appear to be required for the display in the authoring UI to be useful).

I can see that the servlet endpoint for 'recording' the impression (/libs/wcm/stats/tracker.js) can be configured to point elsewhere... however is the recommendation really to point this back to the author environment? Is that really the suggested architecture though?

Even aside from the fact that you might not want your author 'externally' accessible (which I guess could be avoided by adding a servlet to publish which 'proxies' the request back to author, or using mod_proxy), surely, letting load from the publish servers anywhere near author doesn't sound like a great idea, plus there's all sorts of authentication issues here. This can be easily demonstrated by firing up a local author and publish, and browsing the Geometrixx online site on Publish as an unauthenticated user (watch for 403s for /tracker.js).

I would imagine the concerns above might also apply to the MVT capabilities (although I notice they use a separate tracking endpoint).

Am I missing something fundamental here about how this should be leveraged?

Thanks in advance,

tom