Telemetry #

The Telemetry service accepts events from game clients, game services, Pragma Engine plugins, and custom services and forwards them to a big data store.

While telemetry applies to many different kinds of data collection, Pragma Engine uses it to describe high-volume, less structured, big data information. Pragma Engine provides a real-time telemetry event collector that terminates data into a data store of choice. Telemetry is useful for collecting high resolution data around specific questions or features, and requires post-processing to produce actionable insights.

The service accepts events in realtime and delegates to a configured storage provider. Studios can use standard, existing toolchains for data analytics and processing.

Data can be passed individually or in a batch, and messages are sent as JSON. Several standard fields are provided outside of the JSON payload to help with grouping, filtering, and aggregating events.

Operationalize #

While it’s possible to build reports and dashboards against raw telemetry data, it’s not recommended. The result will be dashboards that are slow to load due to the volume of data being processed. The reports will also be fragile, breaking when changes are made to the raw telemetry events. Instead, create ETLs that aggregate data into an operable format and build reports against these.

For example, exploratory queries and ad-hoc reports can be built against raw telemetry, but it is advisable to transform raw events into well-formed schemas that are tailored to their purpose. This improves performance, reliability, and reduces the cost and complexity of producing actionable insights.

Below is a sample workflow for building a game health report.

Configuration #

The Telemetry service is configured through TelemetryServiceConfig:

Client and game server event sampling #

globalWeight, perEventWeight, and alwaysEnabledIds control how much telemetry is sent. SDKs fetch the sampling config on the first telemetry send attempt of a connection, and config changes are broadcast to connected sessions in real time. alwaysEnabledIds is resolved per session on the platform—the list itself is never sent to clients.

The same weights gate telemetry sent by Pragma-integrated dedicated game servers, so setting globalWeight to 0 disables both client- and server-originated telemetry without a redeploy. Two differences apply on the game server side, both following from a game server connection carrying events on behalf of many players rather than one:

• Sampling is evaluated per event against that event’s own sourceId, so the same player is sampled consistently whether their events arrive from the client or from the game server.
• alwaysEnabledIds applies only to game clients. The allowlist is resolved against a session’s own fixed ID, which a game server connection does not have. You can still sample or fully disable game server telemetry through the weights; there is no per-player force-enable for it.

game: # or social/telemetry
  serviceConfigs:
    TelemetryServiceConfig:
      globalWeight: 800
      perEventWeight:
        "event-a": 800
        "event-b": 50
      alwaysEnabledIds:
        "00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000001": ""
        "00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000002": ""

Dedicated Backend #

Telemetry can run on a dedicated backend, isolated from your game and social backends, so high-volume event traffic doesn’t compete with latency-sensitive gameplay RPCs. See Dedicated Telemetry Backend for details.