What are Tracking Plans, & why do you need one?

At RudderStack we emphasize the significance of owning your own data and building robust analytics with complete data to gain a competitive advantage. Data trust is crucial in this context, requiring trust in the tools providing the data. This led to the development of the Data Governance API and the new Tracking Plans feature now in beta.

RudderStack Tracking Plans is the latest addition to our Data Governance API and a highly demanded feature. They differ from RudderStack Transformations, offering the ability to plan and pre-define the structure of your data. Tracking Plans address critical issues associated with streaming data:

• Missing or misconfigured data that disrupts downstream SaaS applications and data warehouses, leading to poor automated campaigns and broken dashboards.
• Poorly named and repetitive events and properties causing confusion and mismapping in downstream tools and data warehouses.
• Changes made by upstream data providers, resulting in altered event streams with little to no advance notice or the ability to rectify.

How Tracking Plans solve these issues:

RudderStack Tracking Plans allow you to define the specific event names and properties for each track, group, and identify call. Moreover, you can assign data types to each property or attribute, as well as specify if it’s required. The Tracking Plans API also supports versioning for better control of your streaming data. Once your Tracking Plans are in place, you can use the existing Data Governance API to assess your inbound events, payload samples, and metadata against your plans.

Future Features:

Although still under development, planned features include actions to address violations such as unplanned events, unplanned properties, mismatched data types, and missing required fields, with options to reject, accept, reroute, or handle in more advanced ways.

Getting Started:

For those interested in participating, connect with us on Slack or via email. In the meantime, we offer guidance on how a typical SaaS business can design and implement Tracking Plans with RudderStack as part of the Data Governance API, utilizing the Tracking Plans Template Google Sheet. The process starts with creating a wish list of events and properties, followed by building and managing Tracking Plans through code.

Building out Tracking Plans:

The event names, properties, and property types are identified and added to the Tracking Plans Google Sheet. Each source should have its own tab copied from the “Import Template”. The plan is then made available in RudderStack by configuring additional settings in the Google Sheet.

One exciting part of the Tracking Plans Google Sheet is that you can download the latest version of a tracking plan from the RudderStack Tracking Plan API, then upload any…