Stop Waiting for App Releases: Instrument New Events and Metadata On-Demand
Every product manager and data analyst knows the feeling. You have a simple, urgent business question—"How many users are clicking our new promo banner?"—but the data to answer it doesn't exist.
To get it, you have to file an engineering ticket, wait for the next development sprint, and then wait for the app to be released. By the time you get the data, weeks have passed, and the opportunity is lost.
What if you could answer that question in the next five minutes, without writing a single line of code?
We're thrilled to announce remote instrumentation, a powerful new "on-demand" data collection feature that lets you react instantly to new business questions without waiting for an app release.
How It Works: Point, Click, Collect
Available today for our Javascript collectors, this feature lets you use the Datazoom console to configure the collection of new custom events and metadata just by pointing to elements on your website.
It’s a simple, code-free workflow:
Configure Custom Events: To track a new event, you simply provide a CSS selector for the element you want to watch (e.g., #promo-banner-button) and an interaction type you care about (like a click, hover, or view).
Capture Custom Metadata: To capture a new piece of metadata—like the text of an H1 tag or the value of a form field—you just provide its CSS selector and define its data type (e.g., string, number, boolean).
This Isn't Just Scraping. It's Data Governance.
This feature is far more powerful than a simple tag manager. It's fully integrated with Datazoom's data governance capabilities. When you configure new data, you can enforce strict rules to ensure it's clean before it's collected:
For Numbers: Define the expected units (e.g., ms, seconds), number type (integer, float), and even minimum/maximum values.
For Strings: Define the string type, such as General, URL, or even a specific list of allowed values.
A First-Class Citizen in Your Data Strategy
This is the best part: data collected "on-demand" is not treated as second-class.
You can map this remotely instrumented data to a "first-class" aliased field—just like the data you collect via the SDK.
This means your new, code-free data point can be individually selected, deselected, filtered, transformed, and enriched, just like any other field in the Datazoom platform. It's a true "first-class citizen" from the moment you create it.
What's Next
Remote Instrumentation is available today for all your Javascript applications.
We are already hard at work extending this powerful "on-demand" capability to our native SDKs, which will allow you to target elements within the native view hierarchy using selectors like XPath.
Get ready to leave the "analytics backlog" behind and start answering questions at the speed of your business.
To learn more, visit the Remotely Instrument Custom Events and Metadata section on the help site article about sending custom data.
