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Analytics Module: Segment

This plugin provides an opinionated implementation of the Backstage Analytics API for Segment. Once installed and configured, analytics events will be sent to the configured Segment Workspace as your users navigate and use your Backstage instance.

Requirements

This plugin requires an active workspace with Segment. Please reference the Getting Started Guide to get set up before proceeding.

Installation

Install the plugin package in your Backstage app:

# From your Backstage root directory
yarn --cwd packages/app add @segment/backstage-plugin-analytics-module-segment

Wire up the API implementation to your App:

// packages/app/src/apis.ts
import {
  analyticsApiRef,
  configApiRef,
  identityApiRef,
} from '@backstage/core-plugin-api';
import { SegmentAnalytics } from '@segment/backstage-plugin-analytics-module-segment';

export const apis: AnyApiFactory[] = [
  // Instantiate and register the SegmentAnalytics API Implementation.
  createApiFactory({
    api: analyticsApiRef,
    deps: { configApi: configApiRef, identityApi: identityApiRef },
    factory: ({ configApi, identityApi }) =>
      SegmentAnalytics.fromConfig(configApi, {
        identityApi,
      }),
  }),
];

Optional: Configure a user transform

By default, this analytics plugin identifies the user taking actions as the logged in Backstage User's entity reference string (e.g. user:development/guest). Currently, no other information is provided to the identify call.

To anonymize users, a userIdTransform can be provided in one of two ways:

  1. The string value sha-256
  2. A custom transformation function that matches the contract of (userEntityRef: string) => Promise<string>

If sha-256 is provided, the user entity reference will be pseudonymized into a sha256 string value.

// packages/app/src/apis.ts
import {
  analyticsApiRef,
  configApiRef,
  identityApiRef,
} from '@backstage/core-plugin-api';
import { SegmentAnalytics } from '@segment/backstage-plugin-analytics-module-segment';

export const apis: AnyApiFactory[] = [
  // Instantiate and register the SegmentAnalytics API Implementation.
  createApiFactory({
    api: analyticsApiRef,
    deps: { configApi: configApiRef, identityApi: identityApiRef },
    factory: ({ configApi, identityApi }) =>
      SegmentAnalytics.fromConfig(configApi, {
        identityApi,
        userIdTransform: 'sha-256',
      }),
  }),
];

For enhanced security, providing a custom transformation function can be used to hash the value in any means desired.

// packages/app/src/apis.ts
import {
  analyticsApiRef,
  configApiRef,
  identityApiRef,
} from '@backstage/core-plugin-api';
import { SegmentAnalytics } from '@segment/backstage-plugin-analytics-module-segment';

export const apis: AnyApiFactory[] = [
  // Instantiate and register the SegmentAnalytics API Implementation.
  createApiFactory({
    api: analyticsApiRef,
    deps: { configApi: configApiRef, identityApi: identityApiRef },
    factory: ({ configApi, identityApi }) =>
      SegmentAnalytics.fromConfig(configApi, {
        identityApi,
        async userIdTransform(userEntityRef: string) {
          const salt = configApi.getString(
            'custom.config.analytics.userIdSalt',
          );
          const textToChars = (text: string) =>
            text.split('').map(c => c.charCodeAt(0));
          const byteHex = (n: number) =>
            ('0' + Number(n).toString(16)).substring(-2);
          const applySaltToChar = (code: number) =>
            textToChars(salt).reduce((a, b) => a ^ b, code);

          return textToChars(userEntityRef)
            .map(applySaltToChar)
            .map(byteHex)
            .join('');
        },
      }),
  }),
];

Optional: Prevent user identification

If you choose not to identify Backstage users in analytics events, simply neglect to provide the identityApi when initializing the SegmentAnalytics API.

// packages/app/src/apis.ts
import { analyticsApiRef, configApiRef } from '@backstage/core-plugin-api';
import { SegmentAnalytics } from '@segment/backstage-plugin-analytics-module-segment';

export const apis: AnyApiFactory[] = [
  // Instantiate and register the SegmentAnalytics API Implementation.
  createApiFactory({
    api: analyticsApiRef,
    deps: { configApi: configApiRef },
    factory: ({ configApi }) => SegmentAnalytics.fromConfig(configApi),
  }),
];

Doing so will allow analytic events to continue to be sent to Segment, just with the the events being attributed to anonymous user IDs.

Configure the plugin in your app-config.yaml:

The following is the minimum configuration required to start sending analytics events to Segment. The only requirement is the write key for the Analytics.js Source that was created for your Backstage instance.

# app-config.yaml
app:
  analytics:
    segment:
      writeKey: abcABCfooBARtestKEY

Configuration

Disabling

In some pre-production environments, it may not be prudent to load the Segment Analytics plugin at all. In those cases, you can explicitly disable analytics through app configuration:

# app-config.yaml
app:
  analytics:
    segment:
      enabled: false # Prevent the analytics instance from loading
      writeKey: abcABCfooBARtestKEY # write key is still required in app-config

Debugging and Testing

In pre-production environments, you may wish to set additional configurations to turn off reporting to Analytics and/or print debug statements to the console. In those cases, you can explicitly disable analytics through app configuration:

app:
  analytics:
    segment:
      writeKey: abcABCfooBARtestKEY
      testMode: true # Prevents data being sent to Segment and logs what would have been sent instead
      debug: true # Configure debug on the Analytics module and write the Backstage analytics event to the web console

Analytics agent options

Additional configuration is available to configure the Analytics.js agent as follows:

app:
  analytics:
    segment:
      writeKey: abcABCfooBARtestKEY
      agent:
        # Disable storing any data on the client-side via cookies or localstorage
        disableClientPersistence: true
        # Disables automatically converting ISO string event properties into Dates.
        disableAutoISOConversion: true
        # Whether or not to capture page context early so that it is always up-to-date.
        initialPageView: true

Note

The testMode and debug configuration fields work independently of each other. If debug is true and testMode is false, analytics events will still be sent to Segment and debug information will be written to the console still.