Access Watch vs Profound Agent Analytics

End of life The Access Watch plugin for WordPress is not supported anymore and the plugin is unactive. The Access Watch plugin is a traffic analysis and security service. Our technology processes visitor activity on your WordPress website and delivers insights to improve site security and performance. Using innovative pattern matching and signature identification, our real-time analysis clearly breaks down your traffic between human and robots, immediately identifying threats and enabling you to block them from abusing your website. All in a beautiful and easy-to-use dashboard! Access Watch is highly efficient in detecting and mitigating numerous website threats, including: brute force attacks comment spam & trackback spam contact form spam suspicious registrations suspicious xml-rpc requests (spam, attacks) referer spam (also known as referral/referrer spam)

Profound Agent Analytics is a powerful WordPress plugin that integrates with Profound’s edge log analysis service to identify, classify, and provide reporting on bot and human traffic to your website. The plugin works by efficiently collecting and sending request data from public pages to Profound’s analytics platform. Read more here Key Features Non-blocking Performance: Uses an asynchronous queue system to ensure zero impact on page load times Privacy-Focused: Query parameter redaction to protect sensitive data Smart Batching: Efficiently sends logs in batches to minimize network overhead Circuit Breaker: Automatic protection against API failures to prevent cascading issues Flexible Configuration: Extensive settings for customizing what data is collected and sent Enterprise Ready: Supports environment variables and constants for API key configuration How It Works The plugin captures essential HTTP request metadata (method, path, status, timing) Data is immediately queued in a local database table with minimal overhead A background process sends batched logs to Profound’s API endpoint Failures are automatically retried with exponential backoff Your Profound dashboard provides real-time insights into your traffic Privacy & Security Profound Agent Analytics is designed with privacy and security at its core: Complete IP Tracking: Captures full IP addresses for accurate traffic analysis and reverse DNS lookups (required for bot detection) Sensitive Data Protection: Automatically redacts passwords, tokens, and credit card information from query parameters Public Traffic Only: Excludes all WordPress admin, REST API, and system paths – only tracks public visitor traffic Encrypted Storage: API keys are encrypted using WordPress salts when Sodium extension is available No Cookie Tracking: Server-side only – does not use cookies or client-side tracking Performance Optimized Adds less than 1ms to request processing time Efficient database operations with proper indexing Automatic cleanup of old log entries Memory-aware batching to prevent large payloads Configurable queue size limits Privacy Policy This plugin sends data to Profound’s analytics service (https://artemis.api.tryprofound.com). The data sent includes: – Full IP addresses (required for bot detection and traffic analysis) – Request URLs from public pages only (admin and system paths are excluded) – HTTP headers (user agent, referer) – Response metadata (status code, size, duration) – Query parameters (with sensitive values redacted) The plugin only tracks public visitor traffic. WordPress admin activity, user actions, and system operations are not collected. All data is processed in accordance with Profound’s privacy policy available at https://tryprofound.com/privacy-policy System Requirements WordPress 6.0 or higher PHP 7.4 or higher MySQL 5.7+ or MariaDB 10.2+ Ability to make outbound HTTPS requests WP-Cron enabled (or real cron configured) Sodium PHP extension (recommended for encryption) Development & Testing This plugin includes a .wp-env.json configuration for local testing using wp-env. This requires Docker (or OrbStack) and Node.js. Running Compatibility Tests Start the environment: npx @wordpress/env start Verify the plugin activates without errors: npx @wordpress/env run cli wp plugin deactivate agent-analytics-wp-plugin npx @wordpress/env run cli wp plugin activate agent-analytics-wp-plugin Verify all classes instantiate and core functionality works: npx @wordpress/env run cli wp eval ‘new AgentAnalytics\Settings(); new AgentAnalytics\Queue(); echo “OK”;’ Check for PHP errors, warnings, or deprecation notices (WP_DEBUG is enabled): npx @wordpress/env run cli cat /var/www/html/wp-content/debug.log If the file does not exist, there are no errors. Stop the environment: npx @wordpress/env stop To test against a different WordPress version, edit the core value in .wp-env.json (e.g. "WordPress/WordPress#7.0") and restart. Deploying to WordPress.org See DEPLOY.md for instructions on publishing releases and updating the “Tested up to” value via SVN. Support For support, please contact [email protected]