Tech Note: Should I use Pendo for performance monitoring of my application?

Overview

Technically, you could use Pendo for performance monitoring. However, depending on your use case, using another product might be easier, faster, and provide more value. 

• The Pendo agent automatically collects product usage data with the goal of understanding user behavior. Pendo is not designed for application performance monitoring.
• Relevant performance metrics (e.g. page load time) could be calculated through another mechanism/tool, and that data could be sent to Pendo as a track event which requires development effort.
• It’s important to consider what you intend to do with those track events in the Pendo UI, especially with regards to reporting.
• If you aren’t able to create the desired reports within the Pendo UI and need to use the Pendo API instead, it may not be worth sending the data to Pendo in the first place. 

What data does the Pendo agent automatically collect?

It’s likely that the metrics you wish to use for performance monitoring are not collected automatically by Pendo. 

Pendo automatically collects:

• Page Load events (URL of the page, some browser information (such as language and browser version), and the title of the page.)
• Click events and focus events
• Visitor & account metadata as defined within the installed Pendo snippet

For more details, please see this page: Data collection and compliance

What about Pendo Track events?

If you are able to calculate the performance metrics you want to analyze (e.g. page load time), you could send that data to Pendo as a track event. 

Your developers would be responsible for:

• Calculating the performance metrics 

AND

• Configuring the track event to be sent to Pendo

Learn more about configuring Track events with these resources:

• Track Events Overview article
• Tech Corner Track Events Overview video (5 min) 

Using Track events in Pendo

Let’s assume that your developers are able to measure page load time and send that data to Pendo as a track event. On every page load, they send a track event to Pendo called ‘pageloadtime’ and it has four event properties: 

• page_title: The name of the page (string)
• load_time_ms: How long the page took to load in milliseconds (number)
• load_time_ text: Either the text ‘unacceptable’,  ‘slow’, or 'normal' (string)
• error_message: The text of the error message if one occurred (string)

These articles explain how you might use track events and event properties as part of a segment within Pendo for analytics. It also explains how track events are limited when it comes to guide targeting: 

• Track Events
• Event Properties

How does this apply to our example?

You could potentially create a segment to identify visitors who received a track event with a specific error message or a slow load time (both are event properties), and then analyze their usage patterns in Pendo. However, it would not be possible to use that segment for guide targeting. 

This article explains the reporting capabilities within the Pendo UI for event properties:

• Event Properties

How does this apply to our example?

There are some reporting options available in Data Explorer for event properties that are strings, so you could do some reporting on page_title, load_time_text, and error_message. However, if you wanted to do any calculations or create a chart for the event property load_time_ms, which is a number, the report would have to be created outside of Pendo. This would require pulling the data out of Pendo via the API into a data warehouse and then connecting a separate reporting tool. If that’s the approach you need to take, it may not be worth sending the page load time data to Pendo in the first place. It may make more sense to send the page load time data directly to your data warehouse.