App and tracker information

Information about the application and the tracker instance that is sending the events to Snowplow can be useful for data analysis and troubleshooting issues.

You can track this in two ways: setting atomic event properties, or configuring the application entity.

Application atomic event properties

These properties can be assigned across all our trackers, regardless of the platform.

Atomic table field	Type	Description	Example values
name_tracker	text	The tracker namespace	tracker_1
app_id	text	Unique identifier for website / application	snow-game-android
platform	text	The platform the app runs on	web, mob, app
v_tracker	text	Identifier for Snowplow tracker. The format follows the convention of TRACKER_NAME-TRACKER_VERSION	js-2.16.2

You can specify the tracker namespace and app ID when creating a new tracker instance.

The tracker platform is set automatically but can be overriden in most of our trackers. The tracker version is also set automatically.

Application entity

You can configure your web or mobile trackers to automatically include an application entity with all tracked events.

The included data is slightly different depending on the platform, as different schemas are used:

• Web: version only
• Mobile: version and build

This table shows the support for the application entity across the main client-side Snowplow tracker SDKs. The server-side trackers don't include this entity.

Tracker	Supported	Since version	Auto-tracking	Notes
Web	✅	4.1.0	✅
iOS	✅	1.0.0	✅
Android	✅	1.0.0	✅
React Native	✅	4.0.0	✅	Uses web or mobile schema depending on configuration
Flutter	✅	0.3.0	✅	Available for mobile only
Roku	✅	0.1.0	✅
Google Tag Manager	❌

The native mobile trackers are able to extract the application version and build number automatically from the app metadata. For web, you need to provide the application version manually in the tracker configuration.

Entity definitions

Web applications:

application

Entity

Schema for an application context which tracks the app version.

Schema URIiglu:com.snowplowanalytics.snowplow/application/jsonschema/1-0-0

Example

json

{
  "version": "1.1.0"
}

Properties and schema

Table

Property	Description
version string	Required. Version of the application. Can be a semver-like structure (e.g 1.1.0) or a Git commit SHA hash.

JSON schema

json

{
  "description": "Schema for an application context which tracks the app version.",
  "properties": {
    "version": {
      "type": "string",
      "description": "Version of the application. Can be a semver-like structure (e.g 1.1.0) or a Git commit SHA hash.",
      "maxLength": 255
    }
  },
  "additionalProperties": false,
  "type": "object",
  "required": [
    "version"
  ],
  "self": {
    "vendor": "com.snowplowanalytics.snowplow",
    "name": "application",
    "format": "jsonschema",
    "version": "1-0-0"
  },
  "$schema": "http://iglucentral.com/schemas/com.snowplowanalytics.self-desc/schema/jsonschema/1-0-0#"
}

Mobile applications:

application

Entity

Schema for an application context which automatically tracks version number and build name when using our mobile SDK's.

Schema URIiglu:com.snowplowanalytics.mobile/application/jsonschema/1-0-0

Example

json

{
  "version": "1.1.0",
  "build": "s9f2k2d"
}

Properties and schema

Table

Property	Description
version string	Required. Version number of the application e.g 1.1.0
build string	Required. Build name of the application e.g s9f2k2d or 1.1.0 beta

JSON schema

json

{
  "$schema": "http://iglucentral.com/schemas/com.snowplowanalytics.self-desc/schema/jsonschema/1-0-0#",
  "description": "Schema for an application context which automatically tracks version number and build name when using our mobile SDK's.",
  "self": {
    "vendor": "com.snowplowanalytics.mobile",
    "name": "application",
    "format": "jsonschema",
    "version": "1-0-0"
  },
  "type": "object",
  "properties": {
    "version": {
      "type": "string",
      "description": "Version number of the application e.g 1.1.0",
      "maxLength": 255
    },
    "build": {
      "type": "string",
      "description": "Build name of the application e.g s9f2k2d or 1.1.0 beta",
      "maxLength": 255
    }
  },
  "required": [
    "version",
    "build"
  ],
  "additionalProperties": false
}