Telemetry is the data a game and its backend send about what is happening while players play. Done well, it tells engineers where the game is struggling before players complain, tells designers how people actually play, and gives live ops teams the numbers they need to run events and seasons. Done badly, it produces huge volumes of data that nobody trusts and a bill that grows faster than the player base.
We have built telemetry SDKs in C++, C# and Go, with Unreal and Unity integrations, for a major cloud gaming platform. Here is what we have learned about what to collect and how to make it useful.
It helps to think of telemetry in two groups, because they serve different people and have different needs.
Player and gameplay events describe what players do, such as starting a session, finishing a match, buying an item or quitting a tutorial. Analysts, designers and product managers use them to understand behavior over days and weeks.
Operational telemetry describes how the game and its services are running. It covers metrics, logs and traces from game clients, game servers and backend services. Engineers and live ops teams use it to spot problems within seconds or minutes.
Both can share the same pipeline, but they need different retention, sampling and alerting.
A few decisions make a large difference later.
Agree a naming and schema convention for events before the first one ships, and version your schemas so a change in one build does not break every report. Keep a shared catalog of events that anyone on the team can read.
Batch and compress events on the client so telemetry does not affect frame rate or mobile data use. Engines differ here, which is why SDKs need proper integrations for Unreal and Unity and should not be generic wrappers.
Sample high-volume, low-value events and keep full detail on the events that matter for money, fairness and stability. Purchases and crashes should never be sampled away.
Keep personal data out of telemetry wherever possible. Use pseudonymous player IDs and avoid sending emails, names or free text. This keeps your analytics simpler to secure and makes compliance reviews far easier.
Build the pipeline to deliver data in close to real time. A dashboard that updates the next morning is fine for a monthly review, but it is too late during a launch or a live event.
Different teams need different views of the same data. Engineers need dashboards and alerts on errors, latency and server health, with alerts tied to player impact so they are not woken up for noise. Live ops teams need event and season performance in near real time, along with economy health. Producers and product managers need retention, engagement and revenue trends. Designers need funnels and heatmaps that show where players get stuck.
The test of good telemetry is whether people make decisions with it. If a dashboard has not been opened in a month, it is worth asking whether the events behind it are still needed.
Terminal Velocity's data modernization work covers data platforms, telemetry and observability, and analytics migrations. We build SDKs and instrumentation that show how systems behave in production, and cloud-native pipelines that deliver that data in close to real time to the people who use it. For a major cloud gaming platform, we built observability SDKs in three languages with integrations for two game engines.
If you need better visibility into a live game, see our data modernization work or start a conversation.
Telemetry is the data a game and its backend send about what is happening in production. It shows how players play and how systems perform, so teams can fix problems quickly and make better decisions about the game.
Yes. We build telemetry SDKs and instrumentation for game clients, game servers and backend services, including C++, C# and Go SDKs with Unreal and Unity integrations.
It should not, if events are batched, compressed and sent efficiently. Engine-specific integrations help keep the overhead low.
As little as possible. Pseudonymous player IDs cover most analysis needs and keep the data easier to secure and to manage under privacy rules.