Integration Quality Assurance & Go-Live

In this step, the primary objective is to ensure the quality and correctness of your integration before go-live, ensuring optimal outcomes from our collaboration. Our main tool for this, is the Integration Monitoring Dashboard.

Understanding the Integration Monitoring Dashboard

Integration Monitoring Dashboard

After we have activated your Froomle environment(s), we will provide access to your Integration Monitoring dashboard via the Froomle portal. This dashboard allows you to check the correctness of your Froomle integration through 3 panels:

  • The Activity Panel at the top displays events to verify against your internal data.

  • The API Errors Panel on the left helps you ensure all your API calls are correctly formatted and error-free.

  • The Integration Quality Assurance Panel on the right highlights any warnings about potential issues with your integration. This panel is refreshed daily.

Using the Integration Monitoring Dashboard

During your integration of Froomle, you should use the Integration Monitoring Dashboard to ensure the correctness of your integration.

Ensuring Zero API Errors

The API Errors Panel should always indicate zero API errors for your integration. When the dashboard does show API errors for your integration, you should prioritize the debugging of these errors. This holds for both development and production environments.

As long as your dashboard shows that more than 5% of API calls contain errors, your integration is too buggy to go live.

To help you with debugging, we have written a short guide on eliminating API Errors.

Ensuring Zero Major or Critical QA Warnings

The Integration Quality Assurance Panel should always indicate there are zero critical or major QA warnings for your integration. When the dashboard show critical or major errors for you integration, you should prioritize the debugging of these errors.

As long as your dashboard shows critical or major QA warnings, your integration is too buggy to go live.

By default, QA warnings are not activated for development environments. If you want to avoid issues after go-live as much as possible, and detect them already in your development environment, you can ask your account manager to activate QA warnings for you development environment. In this case however, it is required to fully integrated Froomle in full-fledged stating environment. The reason is that the QA warnings check, for example, that a click_on_recommendation event is preceeded by a corresponding impression event and a corresponding recommendation request. If you do not fully integrate Froomle in a full-fledged staging environment, these warnings will always trigger, cannot be solved, and will therefore create a lot of noise that leads to alerting fatigue.

It is important to understand that certain QA warnings can only surface after go-live. Even if you activated QA warnings for your development environment. Therefore, it is important to schedule development capacity in the hours and days after go-live to fix your integration in case QA warnings would surface.

Ensuring Traffic Matches Internal Data

The traffic indicated by the Activity Panel should be consistent with your internal traffic data. If it is not, you should prioritize the debugging of your integration.

As long as your dashboard shows traffic that is very different from your internal traffic data, your integration is too buggy to go live.

Common mistakes

  • Ensure you have thoroughly reviewed our integration guidelines on user types & anonymous users and on AB testing. Mistakes often result in lower recommendation quality and incorrect reporting.

  • Ensure that you are sending us updates on your item catalogue as quickly as possible. Mistakes result in lower recommendation quality.

  • Ensure your item identifiers (item_id) are unique and match across your items, events and recommendation requests. Mistakes result in lower recommendation quality, specifically users might receive recommendations of items they have already consumed.