I want to be able to record usage statistics for the pages of my Umbraco site. Pages are protected by a membership system, so not all pages are available to all users and the majority of pages are not available to the public. Consequently a Google Analytics based solution doesn't fit well.

Questions arising:

1. Is there a good existing package that covers basic statistics about who visited what and when?
2. If not, would I be better to go through Umbraco to manage this data or not?
3. If I bypass Umbraco, whereabouts should I push data into the database- is there somewhere in Umbraco that is managing connections that I could hijack or should I just borrow the ConnectionString out of the configuration file and use that?
4. Is there some entirely different ( maybe logging-based? ) solution that I should be going for instead?

The reason I suspect it may not be ideal to go through Umbraco is that this is going to be data that is inserted once per page view, so we are potentially going to see a lot of rows being inserted and I am tempted to go for the most bare-bones approach possible so that if we do have any high-usage bursts it doesn't affect system performance too badly. The site is unlikely to be exceedingly high traffic in general, but better safe than sorry in my view.