Why Validating Segment Events Is So Frustrating (And How I Fixed It)

Validating analytics events should be simple. It’s not. If you’ve ever had to check whether events are firing correctly, you probably know the drill: trigger an action, open your debugging tool, click into an event, expand a massive JSON payload, scroll… scroll more… and hope the one or two properties you care about are actually there. Then do it again. And again. And again. Most of the time, you’re not exploring the data. You’re just trying to answer very specific questions: • Does this event fire when it should? • Does it include the right properties? • Are those properties correct? But the tools we rely on don’t optimize for that. They show the entire payload we send to segment and bid you good luck. That is where I found myself nearly a year ago, when after a round of QA too many analytics tickets were filed. The system we had for checking events was just too error prone and bugs were getting past us. So I decided to do something about it... If you want the TL;DR here is the link t