Announcing the bitdrift sandbox

bitdrift Capture is a very different take on observability: our mobile SDKs send no data by default, instead storing all generated telemetry in highly efficient local storage. Our sophisticated control plane sends instructions in real-time to connected clients instructing them on what telemetry to send off of each device. Using a control plane and local storage means that you can log as much as you want and get 1000x the data when it matters, and none of it when it doesn’t, leading to the best ROI around. While integrating the Capture SDK takes less than 10 minutes, we understand that time is precious, and want to allow everyone to dive into the Capture experience with no setup required. We also know that you might want to poke around before sending sensitive data to a cloud service. In order to support this we have launched a sandbox environment where you can:

• Create explorations and workflows, including real-time charts, funnels, and session recordings.
• View session timelines, including our industry leading privacy conscious and highly efficient 2D and 3D session replays.

The sandbox provides a great overview of the Capture product experience which we hope you will enjoy diving into!

Sandbox technical details

Creating a sandbox for a system like Capture is no easy feat. When we set out to begin development we had the following high level goals:

• Demonstrate the full power of Capture using synthetic/mock data and a synthetic/mock control plane.
• Special case as little frontend code as possible to avoid bifurcation between the sandbox experience and the real product, and also to make it easier to add new sandbox features at the same time we add product features moving forward.

In order to accomplish this we rely on the fact that we use gRPC all the way to the frontend via Connect Web, which means that our frontend APIs are structured and well specified. In our frontend code we have set up a mock/sandbox provider which responds to all of the API calls with well formed responses. For generating fake logs, we rely on Falso, along with a custom log builder that allows for creation of logs of different types. And finally for session replay we are currently relying on a random sequence of screens captured via our SDK from the Firefox Mobile app. (Integrating Capture into Firefox will be the topic of a forthcoming post!)

Join us in the future of mobile observability!

Capture is changing the mobile observability game by adding a control plane and local storage on every mobile device, providing extremely detailed telemetry when you need it, and none when you don’t. Check out the sandbox to get a hands-on feel for what working with Capture is like. Interested in learning more? Get in touch with us for a demo. Please join us in Slack as well to ask questions and give feedback!