Topic
Tracking setup
How to instrument a product: designing the events you send, understanding what session replay records, and deciding what you will never collect.
Instrumentation is everything that turns user behavior into data: the events you send, the properties attached to them, the recordings you keep and the fields you mask. The decisions made here limit every report built on top of them. A vague event name, a property holding free text, or an input that was recorded when it should have been masked cannot be fixed later by a better dashboard.
These articles cover the three layers most products instrument. Explicit events describe the outcomes you report on. Session replay captures the context around them. Privacy rules decide what never gets recorded at all. Planning all three together is cheaper than retrofitting any one of them.
Reading order
Where to start
- What event tracking is, and which events are actually worth tracking
Start with events: name them after outcomes, put the variants in properties, combine autocapture with a short list of explicit events, and verify each one.
- What session replay is, and how it actually helps you debug
Then what replay records: a reconstruction of the page and the interactions on it rather than a video, and what that does and does not let you see.
- A practical privacy checklist for product analytics
Then the limits: decide what you will never record, mask by default, get consent right, and review retention like any other product setting.
Tracking setup
Every article on this topic
What event tracking is, and which events are actually worth tracking
An event is not a click you recorded — it is a decision about what deserves a name. Naming, counting, and the ten-to-twenty rule.
What session replay is, and how it actually helps you debug
A replay is not a video recording. Understanding what it actually captures is what turns it from a curiosity into the fastest way to reproduce a bug.
A practical privacy checklist for product analytics
How to collect enough behavioral context to improve your product while minimizing sensitive data exposure.
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