Feature launch: Tracking Plans for violation management

Maintaining high-quality customer data is vital for driving analytics, optimizing customer journeys, and ensuring successful business outcomes. Creating alignment by establishing shared definitions provides a foundation to help you guarantee quality customer data from the source. But customer data is inherently messy. In any complex data environment, you will inevitably encounter malformed data.

Today, we’re launching an advanced violation management feature to help you handle bad data efficiently. Tracking Plans, part of our Data Quality Toolkit, allows you to easily enforce data quality standards on incoming events. This feature works seamlessly with our Data Catalog, so you can spend less time wrangling and more helping your business drive revenue.

Data gets messy in the real world

In the real world, event instrumentation isn’t always perfect, and users can input data that causes issues. The more complex your environment gets, the more frequently you’ll encounter bad data. Even if you do the work to align the business around shared data definitions, the inevitable reality is that some data will violate those definitions.

You need a way to catch violations and set up guardrails so you can troubleshoot and apply fixes before bad data impacts downstream systems and you end up with disgruntled stakeholders. Our Data Quality Toolkit helps you manage the data quality lifecycle. Tracking Plans is your tool for violation management.

Enjoy granular control with Tracking Plans

With Tracking Plans, you can define required attributes and expected data formats for your event data and easily enforce those standards. Tracking Plans automatically evaluates every incoming event against your standards and flags violations of any type on any level – unplanned events, errant key/value properties, missing required fields, etc.

When you catch a violation, you can use RudderStack’s custom logic to determine what to do with the events based on your use cases, data volumes, and risk tolerance. You can drop events, send them only to a data lake destination, or even propagate errors and deliver events with a flag so downstream analytics and marketing teams can apply their own logic and filters.

You can create and enforce Tracking Plans for any combination of sources. Your marketing team likely needs to track different events from your mobile product team. RudderStack enables each team to set up and enforce their own tracking plans but keeps the data team in control.

Tracking Plans features a robust UI for collaborative work but doesn’t confine you to the UI. You can manage Tracking Plans programmatically via API, enabling you to version control changes and easily make rollbacks when necessary.

Start quickly with event imports

Building tracking plans from scratch and making updates manually is tedious, but with RudderStack you don’t have to start from zero. You can choose and import existing events from your data sources and begin implementing violation management immediately. Whether you start from scratch or have existing events and you want to clean them, RudderStack simplifies the process.

Interactive demo: Tracking Plans

Check out the interactive demo below to see Tracking Plans in action:

Get started

Bad data may be inevitable, but it doesn’t have to keep you from supporting your business. With advanced violation management via Tracking Plans, you can spend less time wrangling and more time helping your business drive revenue.

To learn more about Tracking Plans, check out the docs. To see the feature in action alongside the rest of our Data Quality toolkit, request a demo with our team or sign up for our webinar featuring data quality expert Chad Sanderson on guaranteeing quality customer data from the source.