Best practices monitoring and alarming on analytics pixels

[Daniël]

Hi community,

Are there best practices available for monitoring (business) analytics pixel request with RUM? Our business wants to be sure pixels are being loaded on the customerside and alarms are being sent if issues are there. This way they can see the performance impact on the pixels and they're made aware if data is missing and actions are to be taken.

From the RUM waterfall perspective, the requests are visible but I'm having difficulty finding information on howto setup specific insights/alarms on crucial 3rd party calls. Off course I can create synthetic monitors but that doesn't cover the real customer experience collected via RUM. The other way I'm thinking of is trying to create a property fetching a variable or some kind validating the analytics script has been loaded. However, this approach doesn't notify me if there are request errors fetching the pixel.

Does anybody have experience with this or know the best practices in these cases?

Looking forward seeing responses in this thread.

Kind regards,

Daan

[ChadTurner]

If memory Serves me correct, back in 2016 we had a similar issue. What we did was added that 3rd party as a 'first party' then leveraged marking requests as 'Key Requests' then we were able to provide a higher level of monitoring and alerting. Granted, it was a 3rd party, but we wanted it treated as a critical 1st party. 

Since then, it looks like Dynatrace has also built in a 3rd party extension that might be able to add insight without the cost of synthetics: 

[Daniël]

Thanks Chad for your input. I'll have a look to make it a 1st party indeed. Synthetic is something I can do but doesn't fulfill the business need to check it from customer perspective. With regards to the browser extension; we're using the extension to monitor SaaS business applications. Besides we can't roll out the extension our end customers I also don't see options/functionality which can help out to monitor the tracking pixels. 

To be more clear; we're already monitoring the pages with RUM that contains the tracking pixel.