Plugin Analytics Instrumentation Skill

This skill helps you add analytics instrumentation to a Backstage frontend plugin so that app integrators can measure how the plugin is used.

Guiding principles

Follow these before writing a single captureEvent call.

1. Less is more — instrument semantic events, not every interaction

Capture events that represent things your plugin is semantically responsible for — the domain actions only your plugin knows how to describe. Events should reflect user intent (something a person chose to do), not the lifecycle of your UI. Avoid instrumenting generic UI noise that the framework or design system already handles.

Good candidates for plugin-owned events:

• A domain verb only your plugin performs (deploy, create, merge, approve, trigger, refresh, rerun).
• An outcome you uniquely know about (a search returning N results, a scaffolder template saving Y minutes, a task transitioning to a terminal state).
• A context-carrying interaction where the attributes matter (clicking a search result with its rank and to target).

Poor candidates — avoid these: