New Custom Event Limits - Please Read

This post is now deprecated. We have removed the Analysis Point system.

See this thread for more details:
https://forum.unity3d.com/threads/new-data-processing-limits.450266/

Hello Unity Analytics users!

Here's an overview of how Analytics Points work.

Please note that we will never charge you if you exceed your Analysis Points allocation, though certain events may not be tracked. But fear not - you can always manage your Analysis Points via the Event Manager.

Let’s break this down with a few examples:

Example 1: Custom Events with No Parameters
For Custom Events with No Parameters, the cost for each Custom Event = 1 Analysis Point

LevelStart
Custom Event with No Parameters = 1 Analysis Point

LevelEnd
Custom Event with No Parameters = 1 Analysis Point

PurchaseItem
Custom Event with No Parameters = 1 Analysis Point

Total of 3 Points
1000 - 3 = 997
I have 997 points left.

Example 2: Custom Events with Numeric Parameters Only
For Custom Events with Numeric Parameters only, the total Analysis Point cost is equal to the number of Numeric Parameters + 1 for the event itself.

Let’s build out our example below (assuming all parameters are numeric only):
LevelStart
coins
Custom Event with 1 Numeric Parameter = 2 Analysis Point

LevelEnd
coins
levelnum
Custom Event with 2 Numeric Parameters = 3 Analysis Points

PurchaseItem
levelnum
cost
gold
Custom Event with 3 Numeric Parameters = 4 Analysis Points

Total of 9 Points
1000 - 9 = 991
I have 991 points left.

Example 3: Custom Events with Numeric and Non-Numeric Parameters
Now this is where things get a bit tricky. Non-Numeric Parameters (strings and booleans) cost more Analysis Points than Numeric Parameters. Non-Numeric Parameters cost more because we need to run individual calculations on these in order to show you how they break down. The cost of Non-Numeric parameters is equal to the possible values they can assume.

Here are a few more examples:
LevelStart
coins (numerical)
levelname (string) > For levelname, let's assume there are 10 possible values.

Custom Event = 1 Analysis Point
coins: 1 Numeric Parameter = 1 Analysis Point
levelname: 1 String Parameter (with 10 possible values) = 10 Analysis Points
Custom Event with 1 Numeric Parameter and 1 String Parameter = 12 Analysis Points

LevelEnd
hitpoints (numerical)
coins (numerical)
levelname (string) > For levelname, let's assume there are 10 possible values.

Custom Event = 1 Analysis Point
hitpoints: 1 Numeric Parameter = 1 Analysis Point
coins: 1 Numeric Parameter = 1 Analysis Point
levelname: 1 String Parameter (with 10 possible values) = 10 Analysis Points
Custom Event with 2 Numeric Parameters and 1 String Parameter = 13 Analysis Points

PurchaseItem
name (string) > For name, let's assume there are 100 possible values.
cost (numerical)
on_sale (boolean) > on_sale is a boolean (i.e., True or False), so it can take at most 2 possible values.

Custom Event = 1 Analysis Point
name: 1 String Parameter (with 100 possible values) = 100 Analysis Points
cost: 1 Numeric Parameter = 1 Analysis Point
on_sale: 1 Boolean Parameter (with 2 possible values) = 2 Analysis Points
Custom Event with 1 String Parameter, 1 Numeric Parameter, and 1 Boolean Parameter = 104 Analysis Points

Total of 129 Points
1000 - 129 = 871
I have 871 points left.

As you can see, it’s very important to keep track of your Analysis Points and not let any part of the equation get out of control. You can track your usage through the Event Manager tab.

Some recommendations:

• Use numbers when possible
• Spend your points wisely! Don’t send parameters you don’t need.
• Avoid sending highly variable (string) parameter values. For example, a user or device ID is probably a pretty useless thing to include, and will cost a lot of points.
• Think about how you want to analyze your data as you structure your events and parameters.

Hope that helps explain things! Feel free to ask clarifying questions below, we're here for you guys so feedback is always welcome and appreciated

 

do these limits apply per Unity account? or per project?

 

Per project - will update the post accordingly

 

Chiming in on Angelo’s post- we know Analysis Points is a new concept and folks have already established custom events and parameters, so we will not vigorously enforce the 1,000 point limit while we're in Beta. That’s not to say, we won’t ping you if you are getting close or exceed your allowance.

We’d like for folks to start thinking about this, to ask us questions, and to provide feedback on what you think of this framework. As Angelo mentioned, our team is thinking of creative ways to make our product powerful and give you guys the flexibility to implement custom events the way you want to (and keep our data processing costs reasonable).

 

This only applies to the number of different events, nothing changed for the limit of event/hour, right?

EDIT: Just saw the widget on the project page, could it be possible to have a breakdown of our points usage by events? As you realise it could be not that intuitive to see which one costs a lot or not, so having more details could be useful for the users.

 

Like the new system but there's one big hole in it - exception tracking, which is a pretty common requirement these days. Obviously you're going to get a lot of different strings showing stacktraces and it's going to be a really quick way of using up your analysis points.

The thing is exceptions don't need to be tracked like other events. They don't need to be cross referenced and queried in the same way. A big list sorted by build number and perhaps log type is more than adequate. For these reasons, I suggest eventually it would be good to have a separate special event called and ExceptionEvent or something which just takes a log type (debug, warning, error, exception), a string for the error message and stack trace and a build number. The data for this would be shown in new dashboard just for that.

If a developer chooses to use this special event type it could cost a fixed number of analysis points that you guys can choose but the key is that because you shouldn't need to cross reference the error message it shouldn't cost you guys more server time for each message that's different, right?

 

The new data explorer that comes with this change is amazing. Thanks and good job!

 

Will we be able to manually remove certain events or parameters from being tracked? If at some point in our game's development we decide metric A wasn't as useful as we thought and that we really ought to be tracking metric B, it would be nice to have the flexibility to simply discard the old metric (even if it means it's gone forever) and not worry about having wasted our points on useless data. This would also help with string parameters since a typo or error might cause more possible values for a parameter to be recorded than we had intended.

Also, regarding the two-point cost for boolean parameters. If we want to save points it's obviously twice as efficient to just send a 1 or a 0, but is there a benefit in UA to using an actual boolean instead of a number?

 

Hi @Alex2539!

Will we be able to manually remove certain events or parameters from being tracked?
>> This is on our roadmap, currently we envision having some sort of check-box where you can check and un-check custom events you don't find useful anymore. Open to any additional suggestions

Also, regarding the two-point cost for boolean parameters. If we want to save points it's obviously twice as efficient to just send a 1 or a 0, but is there a benefit in UA to using an actual boolean instead of a number?
>> For booleans you'll want to send the data as True or False. If you send it as a 1 or 0, UA will treat it as a numeric parameter, and you'll only be able to see counts/sums/averages, and not the pie chart or bar chart distributions.

 

The point system is nice, it's super flexible then.
As it's supposed to reflect what we're really using on your servers, could it be possible down the road to factor in some of the standard metrics?

For example, we have no in-game monetisation, so that's a whole branch of metrics that we'll never use, so maybe there could be some way to set it up on the project page, and if you don't use monetisation events, you get more points to use for custom events?

So for now, how is it working? when you send a custom event once, it's on the system forever?

 

Hey @khan-amil!

Thanks for the feedback - we'll definitely take it into consideration

So for now, how is it working? when you send a custom event once, it's on the system forever?
>> Currently, yes. If you stop sending Unity Analytics the custom event, it will still be counted towards your analysis points allowance (though as Salley mentioned we won't be vigorously enforcing the Analysis Point cap during the Beta). We are planning on building functionality to allow you to trim events you no longer use.

 

Having string values (like level names, reward types or products, etc) use up points in the way described seems like a recipe for using a ton of points quickly. I could maintain some numeric mapping of these enumerations - an ugly duplication of data really - and make it use less points as you describe, but that makes the UA interface/reports a lot less readable. Do you have any suggestions for compensating on the reporting side for the string->int mapping we will now need to do to keep in budget? Do you have ideas on future payment plans for points where this cap becomes less of an issue because by spending $X a month we have "plenty" of said points?

 

The advantage of strings is that beside doing averages, they keep track of each occurences of these events, so you'd loose a bunch of information that way.

 

Hey @renanse!

Our goal with Analysis Points is to give developers the flexibility to choose which data points they want to analyze. Unfortunately, there are additional processing costs associated with string parameters vs. numerical parameters (hence the extra points), but we are taking a deep look at usage and we will be using feedback from the beta to determine what limits are reasonable (and more importantly, still provide value!) for the free tier of analytics. In the future, there will likelt be premium tiers, which will have a higher number of Analysis Points.

Also, to echo @khan-amil l, I'd actually recommend against numeric mappings: for example, if you have a custom event ClassType, and you send 1 instead of "Warrior" and 2 instead of "Mage", Unity Analytics will treat the 1 and 2 as numerical parameters, which are processed differently from string parameters.

For numeric parameters UA will calculate the sum, count and average. We do more complicated calculations on string parameters so we can show you distributions (useful for answering questions like "Which class is played the most?"). See this forum post for more info on string vs. numeric parameter visualizations.

 

The new data explorer looks pretty sweet! Wanted to confirm that you can now indeed download all the raw event data via the csv download?

And I have to second the request for some sort of int to string mapping since the points system (which does make a lot of sense) discourages string use.

What about a fourth type, which I think most naturally might be called Enum, that was transmitted as an int but for which each int value was understood to be some string? I'd be fine with having to enter those string values via the web interface if necessary, but you could also set up a way for Analytics to accept enums and even do a one time update of enum values when needed (using things like System.Enum.GetNames(typeof(YourEnumType))).

 

Hi @Jazon Burnell!

The CSV export option gives (at the segment level) the count, average, and sum of your numeric parameters, and the count for string & boolean parameters. Export of raw event level data is not currently available, though this is a feature we're looking at.

>> some sort of int to string mapping since the points system ... discourages string use
>> ...set up a way for Analytics to accept enums...

We don't currently support Enums (though we are considering this also). But this doesn't really address the problem you're looking to solve. Even with Enum support (or strings mapped to ints), we still need to evaluate categorical values. Any "category" (i.e., something you want to categorize, rather than sum up), whether expressed as string, Enum, bool or number, requires a unique pass to calculate and distribute.

It's not our intention to discourage string use - in fact we built out the new custom events visualizations specifically so developers could get value out of their string parameters !

However, because of the additional calculations required for string vs. numeric parameters, we introduced Analysis Points to encourage developers to track their string (bool/Enum) parameters carefully.

 

Okay, thanks for the explanation @angeloferro! After re-reading the points explanation it did occur to me that unique enums might not be any different than unique strings in calculation effort if you're just comparing hashes or whatever. Which makes me glad I asked, might have used ints where not beneficial.

And definitely a strong request for the raw event export functionality, there's some AB testing scenarios I'd like to be able to do that I'm pretty sure couldn't be derived from ordinary visualizations of data.

One other suggestion I wanted to throw out there is supporting versions of analytics data, separate from app game version. What I'm picturing is that you assign Analytics some version on the code side and on the web interface side you could view data separated by that version (so on the web side if you had multiple versions, you'd select the version before viewing your data).

My main motivation here is that the way I'd like to start using Analytics is to just throw up a bunch of events, get a feel for what I can do with it and how everything on the web interface side works, then restructure and finalize those events based on that. But right now I feel like I should be close to final the first time, otherwise I'm wasting points and clustering the data with a bunch of old no longer used events.

With version numbers you could set things up so that your first experiments are in one version, then your closer to final setup could be in a different version. And most importantly, I think this could be a potentially simpler way to deal with deleting old events. Let every active version cost it's sum of analytics points, but be able to disable a version on the web side so that data is no longer collected for that version, releasing the points associated with it (if that addresses the analysis cost).

 

Hey @Jazon Burnell,

Thanks for the suggestions! We are planning on building out an easy way to de-select custom events and parameters that you no longer care to track, so they would no longer count towards your Analysis Points allowance. Until that feature is live, here's a rough workaround: create a test app with all your custom events integrated. Once you have a better feel for which events you want to track, create a new app which just the custom events you care about.

>> there's some AB testing scenarios I'd like to be able to do that I'm pretty sure couldn't be derived from ordinary visualizations of data.

Speaking of AB testing, we're working on an update to Segment Builder that will allow you to create segments based on custom event data. This means that if you are able to tag users as "A" or "B" users via custom events, you'll soon be able to create custom segments (i.e., "A Players" and "B Players"). Once you've created these segments, in Data Explorer, you'll be able to compare metrics and KPIs of the "A Players" segment vs. the "B Players" segment.

 

Okay, yeah, I suppose just creating separate test apps would work well enough in the meantime. And would still strongly push for raw data export, but the AB testing you describe does sound pretty neat, looking forward to seeing that.

 

I'm wondering about the 100 custom events per hour limit. Many games have short levels but can be very addicting causing the player to play for long session lengths. In these games calling a "startLevel" event and "endLevel" event could happen within 30 - 60 seconds, maybe less. If the player plays for an hour or more the total custom event calls in that hour would be in the range of 120 - 240, considering that each time a level is played 2 custom events are called.

So very quickly you've run out of custom events you can call in your game and you only have 2. Doesn't leave room for much else. Any recommendations?

 

I'm excited that finally you have released string and boolean values for custom events! I have usually 'tricked' this by making all possible parameters to numeric and send the value as 1 each time the event happens.

Anyway, I really like that you give us count, sum, and average for numeric values. Is there a way that we can know the median and quartiles? Given that numerical values can be so skewed, average can give us the wrong impression of what really happens.

 

@kentunity this is my current solution. The endLevel event has all the important data, but not having a startLevel event prevents you from being able to tell if a player has started a level and left without completing. I'm tracking if they leave via an in game menu but not if they close out the app. The most important data lost in not having a startLevel event is data about when players stop playing your game. Obviously players are going to stop playing in many areas, but if they stop because they don't like the level we may never know.

Unfortunately even with limiting it to just an endLevel event there is the potential to go over the hourly limit with these short 30 - 60 second levels, especially considering the game has multiple other custom events. We don't have heavy tutorials in the current game we're developing but we've have had them before and we tracked tutorial start and complete events. That game would have hit the hourly event limit pretty quickly.

In the future it would be great to have a way to increase the hourly event limit.

 

Hi @kenli_touchten - Thanks for the feedback on our new custom event visualization. I'll add your request for median and quartiles to our list.

 

What we are doing for exceptions is capturing a custom event passing; and that's just a rough idea can probably trim that down a bit

• Message = this is not the exception message rather a short custom string pointing us at where in the code e.g. 'someFunction: doing something hard' or something similar
• Fatal = True/False and indicates rather or not the game will go face down bits up over this message
• Type = The class type of the exception caught if any otherwise we report unknown
• version = The build version

 

I read through this and my head nearly exploded. So convoluted and ridiculous.

 

Hey @Saxi,

Could you elaborate as to what specifically is confusing or where we could do a better job explaining Analysis Points? We're always looking for feedback, and the last thing we want to do is make something more complicated than it needs to be (and that goes against one of our core tenets: making analytics accessible and easy to understand!).

Please know that we are planning on making improvements to the Analysis Points system, like being to able easily select/deselect custom events and parameters you no longer care about. Suggestions are always welcome

 

I read through it, and I understand how it works. It is just overly complex.
You pretty much gave everything from Pro users and gave it to free users, just make analytics a pro service only which free users can pay monthly for if they want it and be done with it.

The point system is like nothing anyone does (sort of like how you did UnityAds requiring people to submit invoices to get paid) and just needless complexity.

 

I may have missed it in the thread, but what happens when the limit is reached?
Events that are already accounted for will still be recorded, but any new ones will be lost?
Will we be able to reset somehow or what will happen?

 

it's per project, but 1000 points for per user per project or just for per project ?

 

Hey @monark - once you reach the 1,000 Analysis Points limit, additional events will not be processed. We are working on a feature to allow you to blacklist custom events that you no longer want Unity Analytics to process (so they won't count towards your 1000 Analysis Points limit). We'll make sure to post in the forums once that feature is ready.

Hi @PAHeartBeat - the 1,000 Analysis points is per project.

 

I would like to add to the desire for more custom events per hour. I'm building a childrens app and want to know how many times they click on various objects in the world to better determine what objects appeal to them. 100 clicks will go pretty fast especially if I track anything else.

 

Sounds a bit excessive and special use case. I would personally collect such data to some local cache and then send something like top 20 and bottom 10 once a day.

 

Just to be clear, once someone runs out of Analysis Points they'll most likely have to pay to get more?

 

Hi @Ryceratops !

We are still finalizing the strategy for Analysis Points. However, during the beta, if you are close to hitting your Analysis Points limit, please reach out to us by filing a support ticket and we'll work with you

 

Hi! If I have a game with 100k dau on facebook (webplayer) - will I be able to use analytics for free? Thanks.

Does analytics support webgl platform already? Thanks!

 

Hi @slava_pankratov,

Unity Analytics is free during the open beta, however we currently don't have support for WebGL. We'll make sure to post if we decide to extend platform support.

Thanks!
-Angelo

 

Hi Angelo,

Thanks for your kind reply

I still has small confusion. The 1,000 Analysis points per project got that point, As other post of unity, Analytics update on batch and every batch runs on 4 / 8 hour duration. So my confusiton is about 1,000 points are

1. Per Batch (which take place and update data after interval of few hours)
2. Per Day (duration of 24 hour)
3. Per Calander day

We have impliments Unity Analytics v 1.9.3 date 5th Jun 2015 on our game which has near about 200,000 active user on Google Play Store.

I have few questions also.

1. May be I asked it before this or not, I don't remamber. When we test game on Unity Editor with analytics, thats events and session are records in final data or not ?

If Yes, than it's should be bad condition for us.
If No, than it's sounds good.

2. I goes thoruhg the fourm link http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/glossary-of-metrics.330017/#post-2138742, regardng that, what basic information and events Unity gather by default, like Device info, OS, Device manfucture.

3. How it counts a day (it's silly question its will be calander day) but my qeustion about what about differant time zones (like GMT 15:00 Friday would be 01:00 Saturday in Japan Tokoyo) So how Unity will manage it to dispaly data on dashboard?

 

Well Analytics events are called by code - and like any code it can be called whenever you like.

Enclosing your event calls in a simple directive should do the trick, no..?

#IF !UNITY_EDITOR
AnalyticsCall(args);
#endif

Great system and implementation by the way, can't wait to try it out

 

Hi @PAHeartBeat - The Analysis Points are 1,000 points per project. The points are per custom event or parameter and it doesn't matter how many times the custom event is processed. We only count the first time the custom event or parameter is processed towards your Analysis Points.

Regarding your questions:

1. When you test your game in the Editor those events and sessions are recorded. Currently we do not support clearing data. Our recommendation for the time being is to create two separate projects (test vs. dev) and replace the test projectId with the dev projectId at build time.

2. Unity Analytics does not collect device info by default.

3. Dashboard dates are based on UTC time, which could to lead to some cases where you might not see data until much later in the day based on your timezone.

 

So, if I send 100 or more for same custom events (no matter when), it will only use 1 analysis point for the entire life time of my project. Is this correct?

 

I was hoping to track a short arbitrary user input string with UA. This makes it sound like it would burn through my points in no time, for this simple use case, no?

Think e.g. a collection of search terms typed by players into an input field.

 

Hi @Marble - You are correct that it may use up your points rather quickly depending the number of search terms you had. For example, if you had ten terms (ie: Word1, Word2, Word3, etc...) it would use up ten Analysis Points.

 

Hi @jjobby - The points are per custom event or parameter and it doesn't matter how many times the custom event is processed. We only count the first time the custom event or parameter is processed towards your Analysis Points.

You example is correct. If you have one custom event and it is sent 100 times it will only use 1 Analysis Point.

 

How do we see a list of all of our custom events? Especially in the scenario where we've maxed out our 1000 points?


How do we get rid of old custom events so they do not count against our budget?

 

1. WIll there be Unity Analytics for Students and Researchers? I find that it's hard to obtain analytic data for me to gather and put into assessments based on Master's thesis/projects/serious games done in Unity and to show it in conferences and lectures. Unity Analytics seems to be just the one I need, but because of the 1,000 Analytic Points limitation, I need to do a bit more reading on this.

2. Say I am tracking 5 input buttons for a Unity game. As I continue to track these 5 buttons, do they incrementally accumulate the Analytic Points up to 1,000? (5 for Day 1. 10 for Day 2. 45 for Day 3 because of more playtesters, etc.)

 

Hi @dwshiraz and @asperatology ,

@dwshiraz,

We are currently working on a way to view and delete custom events! Once this feature becomes available we will make a post to forums. As of right now, one way of viewing a list of custom events is on the Data Explorer page as a drop down menu.

@asperatology,

Since Unity Analytics is still in Beta it is offered free to all users! Our FAQ has some information that you might be interested in, http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/unity-analytics-beta-faqs.292372/, and you can find more general information about Unity Analytics here, http://unity3d.com/services/analytics.

I am also happy to let you know that your Analytic Points will not accumulate incrementally. As you described your button tracking, it should only add up to a total of 5 Analytic Points!

You can also read more about Analytic Points here, http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/new-custom-event-limits-please-read.315594/

 

What if my client will be hacked, and couple devices start to send new(non existing) values for string parameter?
I'll lose a lot of points because of that.

Do you have any protection against it?

Another question: I don't have any events in my project, I have only basic integration. And somehow I'm using 11 points, how that happened? Do you calculate anything from basic integration?

Update:
Maybe it's because I can see a unity.sceneLoad event?
I don't need it, can I turn it off?