Controlling data visibility

Once you start tracking features from your application you may run into the situation where the data being tracked by e.g. your development or QA team interfere with the actual data tracked from your end users. EQATEC Analytics supports two ways of providing a separation between your internal data and your public data.

In EQATEC Analytics, this separation is contained with the Origin setting. All data received is tagged with a specific Origin and you can use this Origin as part of your filtering when browsing data, which allows you to view only public, internal or all data. The screenshot below shows this Origin filter dialog which can be accessed from the filter list at the bottom of the data screens.



Configuring data as internal or public can be done by using mechanism on either the server or as part of configuring the monitor on the client side.

Server side configuration

Data can be automatically marked as internal data when it arrives at the EQATEC Servers if you configure a specific Product Filter to intercept the data. You can find the Product Filter at the bottom of the Product Settings page.

The filter includes the ability to match against the incoming IP address or on specific releases. If incoming data matches the filter, that is arrives from one of the specified IPs or is from one of the specified releases, the data is marked as Internal data. 

Please note that when setting up the IP filter you can upload a full list of the IP addresses that you consider as internal data, which will overwrite the existing list. Also note the limited support for wildcards in the formats as exemplified in the screenshot below.

Client side configuration

You may not be able to determine if data is internal from just the version of the application or even from the IP address of the incoming data. For these scenarios, you will need to resort to a programmatic mechanism. Setting the TestMode property of the IAnalyticsMonitorSettings class to true you can explicitly define that data from this monitor is marked as being of Internal Origin (admittedly, the name of this property hides the true purpose of this flag). Assigning this property will instruct the EQATEC servers to mark the data as internal, regardless of any Product Filter configured. Below is an example in C#, but the concept applies equally to other platforms:

You should typically use this programmatic approach if the IP filter is not working in your setup but you are able to somehow determine from your code that data is internal (you may have other information within your application that can be used to derive this information).

Hope this helps. As always, let us know if you have any feedback