We encourage including the Pendo Web SDK 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.
Skip Pendo in automated testing environments
The Pendo Web SDK functions properly in automated testing, but doesn't provide any value. Including the Pendo Web SDK 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 Web SDK only for deliberate automated testing of Pendo guides or for performance profiling.
Use the same Public App ID across environments
The Public App ID associates the data sent to Pendo with a specific application in your subscription. As a best practice, use one Public App ID for each application. For example, if you have three applications, each application would use a separate Public App ID.
If you install Pendo in multiple environments for the same application, such as Dev, QA, and Prod, use the same Public App ID value in all of them.
Use consistent Visitor and Account IDs across environments
Ideally, the same person has the same Visitor ID in every environment, and the same company or organization has the same Account ID in every environment.
If you can't keep IDs consistent across environments, make sure your IDs don't collide. For example, if multiple end users have the same Visitor ID, Pendo tracks the activity of all of those end users against that one Visitor ID. Collisions can cause analytics to be mixed up, the wrong guide to be shown, and metadata to be inaccurate.
If there are ID collisions between testing and production environments, consider adding a prefix or suffix to the IDs in each non-production environment to indicate which environment they belong to, such as dev- or qa-.
Visit the Pendo Academy for a video on avoiding and resolving ID collisions.
Pages and Features
Including the Pendo Web SDK in pre-production code lets you ensure new or updated Pages and Features can be tagged successfully before pushing your code to production.
Next steps
- Set up your exclude list. This allows you to filter out the data from your lower environments to keep data from your production environment separate.
- Tag your Pages and Features. For more information on tagging, see our articles on URLs for Page tagging and Tagging and viewing Features. We also offer Tagging for web apps tutorials in Pendo Academy.