Insights, guides, and best practices for privacy-first marketing intelligence.
If your self-hosted Matomo resolves visitors to 'Unknown' or one default country, you're almost always missing a GeoIP2 database. The old .dat downloads are dead and GeoLite2 now needs a free license key. Here's the current Matomo 5.x setup, why it broke, and how to keep it updating itself.
core:archive dies on month and year with a DataTable.php fatal, MySQL CPU pins for no reason, and raising memory_limit never helps. It's almost always one thing: archiving, not tracking, is what makes Matomo heavy. Here's why more RAM doesn't fix it and what to tune instead.
Matomo's database errors look cryptic, but the SQLSTATE code in the message tells you exactly which half of the problem you're in. Here's how to read [1045], [2002], and the missing-privilege warnings, and the specific fix for each in Matomo 5.x.
Matomo loads fine on its direct port, then throws a 502 Bad Gateway the second Caddy or Nginx is in front of it. The proxy log says 'connection refused', and that one word tells you exactly what's wrong: your proxy is dialing the host-published port from inside the Docker network, where it doesn't exist. Here's the fix, plus how to size the box Matomo runs on.
Your scheduled core:archive job either errors out with 'the response was empty' or runs clean, prints 'Processed 0 archives,' and leaves dashboards frozen on yesterday's numbers. The two symptoms have different causes. Here's how we diagnose and fix both on Matomo 5.
Matomo's System Check tells you to run core:archive on a schedule, and your dashboards have started to crawl. Both are the same thing: browser-triggered archiving doesn't scale. Here's how to turn it off and run the archiver on cron correctly on Matomo 5.
After upgrading to Matomo 5.6–5.8 (or installing through Softaculous), archiving dies with "Table '…_log_bot_request' doesn't exist - in plugin BotTracking". The BotTracking plugin's table never got created. Here's why, and how to put it back so the error doesn't come straight back.