Session Replay is a Pendo product that allows you to watch playbacks of visitor interactions with your web apps, providing insights into user behavior through both a visual and data lens. It serves various needs, including aiding discovery for UX researchers, facilitating feature adoption for product managers, and assisting in troubleshooting for quality assurance and support teams.
How we capture replay data
After a subscription admin enables Session Replay for an application, the Pendo agent captures elements of your app's Document Object Model (DOM) and user interactions like mouse movements, clicks, and form submissions. Your privacy settings apply at the point of event capture, replacing text with asterisks or blocking entire elements of the DOM from being captured before the events are compressed and sent to Pendo.
These individual replay events are compressed and sent to Pendo. Pendo then stitches together the individual replay events to allow you to visualize a visitor's entire interaction with your application during a defined session.
For more information about potential performance impacts on your application, see Replay performance impacts.
How we select visitors to capture
Session Replay offers unlimited replays, meaning there's no limit to the amount of replays you can capture, and allows you to choose specific visitors to capture using segmentation.
On the Replay Settings page, a subscription admin can create a segment based on visitor or account attributes to determine which visitors Session Replay captures. Update this segment as needed to match the audience you want to capture.
We re-evaluate visitor eligibility on each page load and only capture a visitor's interactions if they meet the segment criteria.
How privacy settings apply
Your chosen privacy settings related to masking text or blocking elements are applied on the client side when the replay event is captured. This means that the data you've masked or blocked is never sent to Pendo.
Tip: If you want to see an example of the events being captured, you can use the Pendo debugger tool. When you enable the debugger, use the Event Monitoring option to enable event logging and look at the "Recording" event types. While they might be difficult to interpret as individual events, using the event logging in the debugger allows you to confirm that the appropriate text masking and blocking rules apply to the events before they're sent to Pendo.
For more information on the privacy settings available for Session Replay, see Session Replay privacy.
Where replays aren't captured
Session Replay isn't supported for mobile apps or canvas elements. This means that you can only enable Session Replay on web apps, and we don't capture interactions within canvas elements.
For web apps that use iframes, Session Replay captures interactions differently based on origin and agent configuration:
- Inner frames of the same origin appear as a single replay.
- Inner frames of a different origin are only captured if the Pendo agent is installed in the frame.
- If multiple Pendo agents with different API keys are running in the same window, the replay is assigned to the application from the top frame, where event capture occurs.
Session Replay also doesn't support capturing images and fonts located on disk in Electron apps.
Content Security Policy (CSP) settings could prevent Session Replay from capturing interactions as expected in your app. To determine if you have the correct CSP configuration required for Session Replay, see Content Security Policy (CSP).
How we handle retention
All replays are stored in the replay library for 30 days from the time of capture. If you need to delete replays containing sensitive data before they expire, contact Pendo Support for assistance.
Saving a replay clip extends its availability to one year from the time of capture. If you delete a clip from an expired replay, it's permanently removed and can't be recovered. Favoriting a replay using the star icon doesn't affect its availability duration.
Captured replay data is stored using the same infrastructure and security standards as other Pendo product data. For details about data storage, encryption, and compliance certifications, see Data collection and compliance.