Skill Unified Analytics
Use this skill when adding or improving telemetry, metrics, funnels, product dashboards, admin reporting, billing analytics, or usage observability. Treat analytics as a product contract, not incidental logging.
Workflow
- Define the decision the metric supports before adding events or charts.
- Inventory existing providers, server logs, database tables, queues, webhooks, feature flags, and analytics helpers.
- Choose the source of truth: client event, server event, durable audit log, billing provider, warehouse table, or pre-aggregated view.
- Define the event or metric contract before implementation: name, trigger, owner, required properties, optional properties, identity fields, privacy level, and version.
- Instrument once at the boundary that best represents truth. Avoid duplicate client and server events unless reconciliation is intentional.
- Validate with a local log, test, provider debugger, database row, or dashboard query before completion.
Event Taxonomy
- Use names in a stable pattern such as
object_actionor the project's existing convention. - Prefer business events over UI implementation details:
checkout_started,subscription_upgraded,report_exported. - Include context that enables segmentation: tenant/account, user role, plan, feature, source, campaign, environment, and request/job identifiers where allowed.
- Do not send raw secrets, tokens, passwords, full payment data, private content, or unnecessary PII.
- Version payloads when shape or semantics change:
schema_version, migration notes, or compatibility handling. - Keep idempotency keys or event IDs for server events that may retry.
SaaS Metric Map
- Activation: signup completed, onboarding completed, first useful action, invitation accepted, workspace created.
- Engagement: active account, retained user, feature used, report viewed, export completed, workflow completed.
- Revenue: trial started, checkout started, payment succeeded, subscription changed, invoice failed, refund, churn.
- Usage and cost: quota consumed, job processed, AI tokens/spend, storage used, seats used, API calls.
- Reliability: job failed, webhook failed, sync delayed, queue latency, API error, retry exhausted.
- Admin and security: permission changed, manual override, impersonation started, user blocked, audit export, policy violation.
Dashboard Rules
- Put metric definitions next to the dashboard code or query when the project has no central metric registry.
- Show period, timezone, freshness, filters, and data source for decision-making dashboards.
- Use indexed tables, materialized views, cached summaries, or warehouse queries for growing datasets.
- Make breakdowns actionable: plan, cohort, channel, workspace, role, geography, feature, or lifecycle stage.
- Include no-data and partial-data states so blank charts are not mistaken for zero.
- Align chart formatting with product UI: units, precision, currency, date granularity, and comparison periods.
Privacy And Reliability
- Separate behavioral analytics from trusted business records. Use server-side durable records for billing, entitlements, security, and admin actions.
- Respect consent, regional rules, and tenant boundaries already present in the product.
- Keep analytics failures from breaking the user flow unless the event is part of a required audit or billing path.
- Log enough implementation detail to debug missing events without exposing sensitive data.
- Document intentional sampling, filtering, deduplication, and backfills.
Validation Checklist
- Event fires exactly once for the intended trigger.
- Required properties are present and typed.
- Tenant/user identity is correct and privacy-safe.
- Failure paths and retries are handled.
- Dashboard queries match the event definition and use realistic sample data.
- Tests, provider debug output, query results, or logs are checked before claiming completion.