Instrumentation: How Startups Actually Capture Data
You cannot analyze what you do not capture. Event tracking, analytics tools, and a clean data warehouse are the foundation of every serious data culture.
#engineering
Data does not magically exist. Engineers and product people have to instrument it.
Common tools
- PostHog, Mixpanel, Amplitude , product analytics
- Google Analytics, Plausible , web traffic
- Segment, RudderStack , event pipelines
- Snowflake, BigQuery, Postgres , data warehouses
- Metabase, Looker, Hex , dashboards and exploration
What good instrumentation looks like
- A clear event taxonomy (consistent names)
- User identity stitched across devices
- Server-side events for anything that touches money
- Privacy and consent handled correctly
Bad data is worse than no data , it produces confident, wrong decisions.