Use Inspector to improve your tracking plan health
What is Avo Inspector
The first step to better analytics governance is knowing what’s wrong with your data today.
Inspector is a tracking observability solution that helps you uncover issues in your tracking today and prevent shipping broken data to production 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 in 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.
- The ability to seamlessly build your Avo tracking plan on top of live data, with the option to build gradually or through a bulk import directly from Inspector.
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.
Learning about Inspector issues and events
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. There are two Inspector overviews available for your incoming data and issues, the Issues view and the Events view – and you can set up Slack Alerts to be notified about new issues.
Issues view
The Inspector issues view displays information about anomalies and discrepancies seen in your production data for the past 24 hours. This view allows you to sort and filter issues to uncover those relevant to you and gives you the overview and information needed to prioritize which of them to act on.
Learn more about the Issues view here.
Events view
The Inspector events view provides a report on all event tracking Inspector has seen in your development, staging and production environments. You can use the dashboard to evaluate the health of your tracking implementation and prioritize issues.
Learn more about the Events view here.
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.
Building your tracking plan using Inspector
You can add both events and properties from Inspector, both via the issues view (where you can bulk import events and properties) and the events view (where you can add individual events). Learn more here .
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:
- Segment
- RudderStack
- PostHog
- Contact us if you want to use another CDP
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.
Does Inspector receive PII data?
No. Inspector does not receive any PII data. Inspector only takes schema metadata, containing event names, property names, and types of properties.
Learn more technical details about the Avo Inspector here.
What's next?
Now when you've set up the Inspector we recommend to start using the mobile debuggers.