Are there standard approaches to persisting data for every hit that a web app receives? This would be for analytics purposes (as a better alternative to log mining down the road).

Seems like Redis would be a must. Is it advisable to also use a different DB server for that table, or would Redis be enough to mitigate the impact on the main DB?

Also, how common is this practice? Seems like a no brainer for businesses who want to better understand their users, but I haven't read much about it.