Testing, debugging and troubleshooting

Testing your tracking implementation

To prevent data loss and bad events, it's important to test and validate your tracking implementation. Snowplow provides two main tools for this, which work well together.

Snowplow Inspector for browsers

Use our browser extension to inspect event requests in the browser Developer Tools window.

Snowplow Micro

A lightweight, local Snowplow pipeline ideal for sending test events into. It's used as a Docker container.

Debugging

Use the debugger plugin to automatically start printing out debug logs to your Developer Tools console. This will help you debug what events are being tracked and what properties are included in each event that is being tracked and to what tracker instance.

note

You may need to enable Verbose logs in your Developer Tools, as this plugin uses console.debug to output results.

An example of the output from this plugin:

Install plugin

JavaScript (tag)

Tracker Distribution	Included
sp.js	❌
sp.lite.js	❌

Download:

Download from GitHub Releases (Recommended)	Github Releases (plugins.umd.zip)
Available on jsDelivr	jsDelivr (latest)
Available on unpkg	unpkg (latest)

Note: The links to the CDNs above point to the current latest version. You should pin to a specific version when integrating this plugin on your website if you are using a third party CDN in production.

window.snowplow('addPlugin', 
  "https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/@snowplow/browser-plugin-debugger@latest/dist/index.umd.min.js",
  ["snowplowDebugger", "DebuggerPlugin"]
);

Browser (npm)

• npm install @snowplow/browser-plugin-debugger
• yarn add @snowplow/browser-plugin-debugger
• pnpm add @snowplow/browser-plugin-debugger

import { newTracker, trackPageView } from '@snowplow/browser-tracker';
import { DebuggerPlugin } from '@snowplow/browser-plugin-debugger';

newTracker('sp1', '{{collector_url}}', { 
   appId: 'my-app-id', 
   plugins: [ DebuggerPlugin() ],
});