Welcome back to our new monthly Release Roundup. In this post we cover all of our August releases including; new dashboards for Snowplow Digital Analytics, new visualization for Snowplow Micro, Azure open source support and many more.
✨Top features this month
Azure Open Source
As one of the world’s leading cloud service providers, Microsoft Azure is trusted by over 15 million corporate clients and half a billion active users worldwide. It will come as no surprise that deploying Snowplow on Microsoft Azure has been highly requested by Snowplow customers and our open source community.
This month we announced the first milestone to running Snowplow on Azure with our quick start guide for open source. It allows users to set up a full Snowplow pipeline within their Azure account and start collecting rich behavioural data and loading it into Snowflake.
As this is a first release, we encourage you to share your thoughts and feedback with us on Discourse to help shape future development.
If you are interested in deploying BDP Enterprise (a private SaaS with extra features and SLAs) in your Azure account, please join our waiting list here.
New Dashboards for Snowplow Digital Analytics
In July this year we announced Snowplow Digital Analytics, powered by Snowflake. Our aim; to provide a warehouse-first alternative to Google Analytics. Teams can keep the reports and metrics they know from Google Analytics without the compliance challenges, limited customer view and lack of data ownership.
Customers that load their Snowplow data to Snowflake can visualise their Snowplow data with a series of dashboard templates for popular bi-tools (Snowpark, PowerBI, Tableau, Preset and Superset) designed to replicate the reports they use within Google Analytics.
Our first out-of-the-box visualisations focused on replicating Google Analytics standard acquisition reports to provide insight into user and traffic acquisition, entry and exit pages and page analytics.
Alongside these out-of-the-box visualisations, our migrator tool helps to convert existing Google Analytics data to match Snowplow’s table structure in Snowflakes Data Cloud rather than battling Google Analytics nested table structure inside of Biquery.
So what’s new in August? We’ve added an additional 9 dashboard templates to provide complete parity with the standard reports in Google Analytics including;
- Engagement reports; measure user activity, stickiness, events over time, conversion and page performance.
- Retention reports; understand key user retention metrics and engagement by cohort
- User reports; breakdown of site audience by country, region and language including metrics such as engagement rate, conversions, new versus returning and many more.
- Technology reports; see how users access your website by platform, operating system, browsers and devices.
All these dashboards are available to use on Snowpark, PowerBI, Tableau, Preset and Superset. We have also released acquisition report templates for Looker.
If you are interested in Snowplow Digital Analytics, you can request a demo here.
Snowplow Micro
This latest release brings a new and intuitive user interface for visualising incoming events. The new UI contains both an overview and a detailed breakdown of the events sent to Micro.
You can see real-time counts of good (valid) and bad (failed) events received by Micro. For every event, you can inspect the various standard fields, including the app id, event type, status, timestamp and associated schema. You can also filter the data to locate your event.
Finally, you can inspect all bad events along a timeline with details of the error messages all in one place to help understand the errors in your tracking code, schemas or enrichments.
The new UI is available to all customers and open source users. To find out more about how you can get started see our documentation and our release blog.
🆕 Other notable releases and updates
Snowplow JavaScript Trackers v3.14.0
The latest update to our JavaScript tracker brings automatic tracking for Vimeo videos based on the Snowplow Media Tracking SDK, allowing users to quickly and easily track Vimeo videos with Snowplow.
Additionally this update brings the Privacy Sandbox Plugin. The Privacy Sandbox is an industry-wide effort led by Google to develop new technology that will improve people’s privacy across the Web and apps on Android by reducing cross-site and cross-app tracking. For more details about the Privacy Sandbox please visit privacysandbox.com.
The Privacy Sandbox Plugin assists in helping websites collect user information exposed by the Privacy Sandbox available APIs. In this first release we support the Topic API.
See our Discourse post for full details about other fixes brought in this release.
Snowplow Open Source License Changes
Over the coming months, Snowplow plans to transition the majority of its open source code (excluding trackers and specific SDKs) from the Apache 2.0 license to our Snowplow Community License to support our continuous investment into open source and Snowplow community.
In essence, the new license grants you the freedom to access and modify the source code, but it restricts distributing the software or creating competing SaaS or on-premises offerings. We expect this change to have a minimal effect on the majority of our open source users.
Snowplow customers, who have purchased BDP Enterprise or BDP Cloud, will not be affected at all, as their use of our software is governed by the commercial license terms.
To read more about the license changes please see our blog and if you have any questions about this change, please don’t hesitate to contact us at [email protected].
🔧 Fixes and performance improvements
Tracker updates
DBT Packages
- Snowplow-fractribution v0.3.4
- snowplow-media-player v0.5.2
Core Pipeline
