I was looking for an easy way to track if our batch and monitoring processes are running properly. We have processes that run quietly unless and error occurs. But sometimes you wonder if they are running at all. An external tracking mechanism is best. We don’t want to have a tracking process that runs on the same machine as those processes being tracked. The problem might be on the host machine itself. I thought about tracking it with Google Analytics but it needs Javascript. I can run Javascript using some open source Javascript library, but then I stumbled upon JGoogleAnalytics.

JGoogleAnalytics is a is a lightweight, unobtrusive Java utility for tracking usage information on Java applications through Google Analytics.

I tried it and it works well. I just had to find a site profile that I can add these application page views to.

I was using the mail merge feature of OpenOffice and discovered a small quirk. I have printed a couple of envelopes and realized the leading zero is missing on zip codes. The fix? I used a CSV file as the database, and putting the zip codes in double quotes in the CSV file did the trick.

I hope this helps someone who is experiencing the same issue.