Telemetry

Problem

Product decisions are based on guesses rather than data. Teams don’t know which features users actually use, where performance bottlenecks occur, or what errors users encounter. When bugs are reported, there’s no diagnostic data to understand what went wrong, making issues difficult to reproduce and fix.

Solution

Collect usage data and performance metrics to understand how users interact with your application. This provides insights for prioritizing improvements and catching production issues.

Example

This demonstrates collecting usage analytics and performance metrics to understand user behavior and inform data-driven product decisions, enabling proactive issue detection.

// Track user interactions with structured event data
analytics.track('Button Clicked', {
  buttonId: 'checkout',        // Identify which button
  page: '/cart',               // Context about where action occurred
  timestamp: Date.now(),       // When it happened
  userId: currentUser.id       // Who performed the action
});

Benefits

• Provides data-driven insights for product and engineering decisions.
• Helps identify and prioritize features users actually use.
• Catches production issues before users report them.
• Enables understanding performance problems in real-world usage.

Tradeoffs

• Raises privacy concerns that require user consent and transparency.
• Adds overhead with analytics code and network requests.
• Can create massive amounts of data that needs storage and analysis.
• Requires careful implementation to avoid tracking sensitive information.