We encourage including the Pendo agent in all instances of your web application except environments used for automated testing. Including Pendo in all environments ensures developers and manual testers are working in an environment as close to production as possible.
Visit the Pendo Academy for a video on installing Pendo in multiple environments. If you're on our US domain, visit the US Pendo Academy. If you're on our EU domain, visit the EU Pendo Academy.
Automated testing
The Pendo agent functions properly in automated testing, but doesn't provide any value. Including the Pendo agent in pages loaded during automated tests could slow down completion time in addition to generating a large quantity of usage data not associated with actual users. We encourage including the Pendo agent only for deliberate automated testing of Pendo guides or for performance profiling.
Single API key
Each API key (or "subscription") uses separate data stores. There are no mechanisms to automatically move data or settings between subscriptions. Pendo provides draft, staging, and public workflow concepts for in-app messaging components to meet testing and development needs. Pages and Features allow multiple rules which can support upcoming changes to the web application.
Unique Visitor and Account IDs
Due to the way Pendo processes metadata values, Visitor and Account IDs must be unique per API key. Excluding is insufficient to address ID collisions.
If there are ID collisions between testing and production environments, consider adding a prefix or suffix to indicate each non-production environment.
Pendo tracks guide interaction behavior at the Visitor ID level. Non-production environments should also contain unique IDs to ensure visitors receive a consistent guide experience.
Visit the Pendo Academy for a video on avoiding and resolving ID collisions. If you're on our US domain, visit the US Pendo Academy. If you're on our EU domain, visit the EU Pendo Academy.
Pages and Features
Including the Pendo agent in pre-production code lets you ensure new or updated Pages and Features can be tagged successfully before pushing your code to production.