Feature tracking question

[Guest]

When you use TrackFeatureValue, is the value captured from an installationID unique? For example, if we track that a user reports that the value of feature Foo is 1... monitor.TrackFeatureValue("Foo", 1); and then later they report that feature Foo is 2 monitor.TrackFeatureValue("Foo", 2); is this registered in the analytics database as two entries (a 1 and a 2) or does it just store the latest value (2)?

[Guest]

Hi Steve Tracking values (and timings for that matter) are tracking of discrete values and we store all values, so the answer would be both 1 and 2. Do you have a scenario where only the maximum makes sense? Hope this helps, feel free to send us more feedback Best regards Soren EQATEC Team

[Guest]

Hi S?ren, Here are the scenarios I'm trying to support. Our application connects to a third party application and for this 3rd party application, there are 3 versions we support. 2008 2010 2012 We'd like to find out how many users are on each version. So I was going to create a FeatureValue call "3rdpartyVersion" and pass it one of 3 values. 2008, 2010 or 2012. The concern I have is that users can update their 3rd party application and move from 2008 to 2010, or 2008 to 2012, of 2010 to 2012. I'm worried that the reports are going to track the same installationID more time then they should. If one of our users moves from 2008 to 2010, I want to decrement my 2008 count and increment my 2010 count. Hope that makes sense. While I have you, my assumption is that I don't have to write logic into my application to make sure that I only send this data one. So if on startup, I send the 3rd party version, the counter is not going to increment each time an individual user starts up, but it only registers once per installionID. Ta. Steve Porter Agile Project Management Division, Telerik, Inc. twitter:@stevevrporter | @team_pulse | @telerik

[Guest]

Hi Steve Thanks for getting back with more info. If I understand your scenario correctly I do not think that tracking a value is the correct way to go. Values are designed to be individual measurement that we aggregate and visualize and as such we have no concept of "one value per user". Once a value is tracked on our API it is delivered to our servers and counts as a single discrete measurement so there is no way to decrement a count in that sense. Similarly, your assumption of a single value per installation id is incorrect. If you register a value on our API we will take that as an individual "measurement" and use that in our aggregations. From my understanding of your scenario you are looking for information on which of the versions of the 3rd party app (VisualStudio??) that are supported and how this support is distributed across your user base. I think of it similar to the information on our Environment page, namely the distribution of users on e.g. Operating systems. If this is in line with your thinking, I'll suggest that you adopt the following tracking convention: 1. Instead of tracking the version as a value, you should track it as a feature i.e. monitor.TrackFeature("VisualStudio." + version); This way you are essentially "tagging" the given session with this property so you should only do this once per application start, typically while initializing your application. 2. You can now access this feature usage data on our web client. You'll be able to see the distribution of version as it relates to the number of sessions (application starts). If you are more interested in the number of users on each version you can go to the filter at the bottom and switch the view to users in order to see the number of users for each version per day (that eliminates any overrepresentation of individual users starting the application multiple times per day). Furthermore you can go to the menu (on the lefthand side) and select 'View total users in period' and we will calculate the absolute number of users on each version in the given period instead of the daily totals We refer to this tracking convention as 'tagging' and it is essentially the same way we collection environment information internally; a single value tracking for each category in the session in order to tag the session within the category. We usually recommend this for tracking additional "environmental" settings such as external libraries, language settings, product types etc. Hope this makes sense and can help you in achieving your tracking goals. I'll be happy to elaborate or provide more information on this if needed. Best regards Soren EQATEC Team