Inspector is a tracking observability solution that helps you uncover issues in your tracking today and prevent shipping broken to production data in the future.

Inspector analyzes tracking calls made by your application across platforms and provides an overview of their structure and volumes in the Inspector events overview, without collecting or processing any user data.

With Inspector, you get an automated audit of the state of your tracking, and ongoing tracking observability moving forward.

Why use Inspector

Teams spend months and years and pay for expensive data audits, only to be left with unrealistic fixes and longer to-do lists. Inspector enables you to stop wasting human hours on detecting and prioritizing issues with your tracking.

Inspector gives you:

An overview of your current state of tracking, highlighting implementation issues as well as discrepancies with your desired tracking plan.
Implementation status for every analytics release in your Avo Branch, available for Development, Staging and Production environments. This gives you confidence and visibility into the status and health of the events that developers are implementing.
Implementation status for the events in your entire tracking plan, so you can see which events are actually implemented and whether they’re sent correctly or not.
Inspector helps you migrate your tracking plan to Avo. Skip importing things you’re skeptical of. Then leverage Inspector to detect how events and properties are actually tracked, and gradually add them to your tracking plan via Avo branches.

How does Inspector work

Inspector extracts the schemas (aka shapes/metadata) of the events you trigger on the client.

Inspector does not process property values or PII data, only event names, property names, and types of properties, and sends those schemas to the Avo servers.

TL;DR: No PII data ever flows through Avo servers; only event schemas.

How to use Inspector

After setting up your sources to send data to the Inspector with the direct CDP integrations or Avo Inspector SDKs you will see the data appearing in the the Inspector tab.

The production environment in Inspector is designed to handle large amounts of data and has up to 2 hours delay from receiving events to displaying them on a dashboard.

Events on dev and staging have no delay in processing and will be shown on the dashboard immediately.

The Inspector events overview

Open the Inspector overview, browse the list or search for a specific event. Select an event and detailed information about the health of the given event will appear in the panel on the right.

If the event you are reviewing isn’t present in your tracking plan in Avo, you can read the event schema and add the event to your tracking plan and if it does exist in your tracking plan but has any discrepancies, you can correct them in Avo to align your tracking plan with your actual tracking.

When you fix the issue in the client you will be able to see how the problem is gradually resolved as you clients update.

Make sure to install the Inspector Slack integration to be alerted as soon as new issues are detected.

How to send metadata to the Inspector?

Install Inspector in your CDP

If you send your events through a CDP (Customer Data Platform) you can configure the CDP to route the event metadata to the Inspector by setting up an Avo Inspector destination.

The main benefit of this solution is that it does not require work from a developer and can be done without changing your application code and releasing a new version. All setup is done on the CDP's side.

Learn how to route event to Inspector from:

Install Inspector with an HTML tag

You can add Inspector to a web page with an HTML tag. This option works for the users of the Google Tag Manager and other tag managers.

Find the tag snippet and instructions to send data here.

Install Inspector SDK

If you’re not using one of the supported CDPs you can send events data with an SDK. It will require one time setup and a new app release and takes 10-30 minutes, depending on the developer’s experience. We recommend asking a developer that is familiar with the existing event tracking setup to help with this setup.

Learn how to set up SDKs for supported platforms:

Not seeing your platform in the list? Contact us if you want to send data from another platform.