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Operational Telemetry

Adobe Experience Manager uses Operational Telemetry to gather operations data that is strictly necessary to discover and fix functional and performance issues on Adobe Experience Manager-powered sites. Operational Telemetry data can be used to diagnose performance issues, and to measure the effectiveness of experiments. Operational Telemetry preserves the privacy of visitors through sampling (only a small portion of all page views will be monitored) and judicious exclusion of personally identifiable information (PII).

Privacy

Operational Telemetry in Adobe Experience Manager is designed to preserve visitor privacy and minimize data collection. As a visitor, this means that Adobe will not attempt to collect personal information about you or information that can be tracked back to you. As a site operator, review the data items collected below to understand if they require consent.
AEM Operational Telemetry does not use any client-side state or ID, such as cookies or localStorage, sessionStorage or similar, to collect usage metrics. Data is submitted transparently through a Navigator.sendBeacon call, not through pixels or similar techniques. There is no “fingerprinting” of devices or individuals via their IP address, User Agent string, or any other data for the purpose of capturing sampled data.

It is not permitted to add any personal data into the Operational Telemetry data collection nor may Operational Telemetry data be used for use cases that go beyond strictly necessary and limited analytics.

Operational Telemetry data is sampled

Traditional web analytics solutions try to collect every single visitor. Adobe Experience Manager’s Operational Telemetry only captures information from a small fraction of activities tied to page views, with no concept of identifying a visitor or a user or even a browser session. Under normal circumstances the sampling rate is one out of one hundred page views , although site operators can decide to increase or decrease this number.

As the decision if data will be collected is made on a page view by page view basis, it cannot be used to track interactions across multiple pages. Operational Telemetry has no concept of visits, visitors, or sessions, only checkpoints during a page view. This is by design.

What data is being collected

Operational Telemetry is designed to prevent the collection of personally identifiable information. The full set of information that can be collected by Adobe Experience Manager’s Operational Telemetry is:

No other data is being collected.

What data is being stored in the visitor's browser

For sites that use the built-in experimentation feature, the name of the experiment and variants that the visitor has seen are also stored in the browser's session storage.

How Operational Telemetry data is being used

Adobe uses Operational Telemetry data for following purposes:

These use cases are strictly necessary to ensure sites running on AEM are working for their visitors.

Data Overview

Data Stored in browser Sent to data collection Persisted Usable for identification/fingerprinting Strictly neccessary
Site host name no yes yes no yes
Data collection server no no yes no yes
Client IP address no optionally never yes no
User agent no yes masked yes, when unmasked no
Timestamp no yes masked yes, when unmasked yes
Full URL of page visited no no no yes no
URL of page visited, without URL parameters no yes yes no yes
Referrer URL (without URL parameters) no yes yes no yes
Page View ID yes, for the duration of the page view yes yes no yes
Weight (Sampling Rate) yes, for the duration of the page view yes yes no yes
Checkpoint no yes yes no yes
Source no yes yes no yes
Target no yes yes no yes
LCP no yes yes no yes
FID no deprecated no no yes
CLS no yes yes no yes
INP no yes yes no yes
TTFB no yes yes no yes
Experiment variants (only when using Experimentation) yes, for the duration of the session yes yes no yes

The data collected and stored is designed to prevent:

  1. Identification of individual visitors or devices
  2. Fingerprinting
  3. Tracking of visits or sessions
  4. Enrichment or combination with personal identifiable information from other sources

Other than Adobe, following third parties are involved in the collection of Operational Telemetry data:

Operational Telemetry for Developers

We have additional in-depth information for developers that want to use data to optimize their own sites, including instructions on how to add Operational Telemetry instrumentation to your site, even if it's not running on AEM.