6 Marking up and enriching telemetry
This chapter covers
- The difference between markup and enrichment
- Where markup and enrichment happen
- How each telemetry style handles markup and enrichment
Figure 6.1 Telemetry Pipeline Stages. Telemetry markup happens during the Emitting and Shipping stages, where telemetry enrichment happens during the Shipping and Presentation stages. Markup and enrichment happen in all pipeline stages, which is the focus of this chapter.
Much of the power of a telemetry pipeline derives from the transformation of telemetry between when the Emitting Stage receives it from the production systems and when telemetry is displayed to a human by the Presentation Stage. Each of the three stages of the telemetry pipeline -- Emitting (chapter 2), Shipping (chapters 3 and 4), and Presentation (chapter 5) -- has the opportunity to enhance telemetry. The two biggest forms of added value are:
- Marking up telemetry by adding context regarding where it originated, providing clues to people asking questions about where and when certain events happened. This can include details such as the browser session, server identifier, and software version that produced a piece of telemetry.
- Enriching telemetry by transforming the format to improve the ability of the presentation stage to answer questions, and providing correlations between events. Such as taking a phrase like “processed 2 pages” and parsing it to produce a database field named pages with a value of 2.