What is the Tracking Plan?

The Chord tracking plan is a specification that defines the events and event properties that Chord sends to Segment. The tracking plan is a comprehensive list of all events that Chord sends to Segment, including events coming from the Chord OMS source and the website front-end source via Chord's SDKs. Find an overview of Chord's tracking plan events here.

Chord imports the tracking plan into Segment as a Protocols Tracking Plan, so you can use Segment's built-in features like violations reporting, which lets you see if events are complying with the Protocols Tracking Plan.

Chord sends events to track the full customer journey on your site, as they add products to their cart, filter lists of products, sign into their customer account, and check out. Chord also sends events when changes take place in the OMS, as packages are shipped, customer subscriptions are renewed, and products come back in stock. All these events and event properties are described in the Chord tracking plan. Here's an overview of the events in the tracking plan.

Chord's tracking plan incorporates Segment's ecommerce spec, although it has additional events and event properties. This is important because some Segment third-party destinations expect events to follow Segment's ecommerce spec.

For a detailed view of all the events and event properties in the Chord tracking plan, you can see the copy that was imported into Segment as a Protocols Tracking Plan. Navigate to the Protocols section in Segment:

From here, you can select the tracking plan and explore a detailed view of every event and event property, including the data type of each property (e.g. "String" or "Number").

Occasionally Chord will release a new feature and add new events or event properties to the Chord tracking plan. When this happens, Chord will notify you that your tracking plan is going to be upgraded. This means Chord will make changes to the Protocols Tracking Plan in your Segment account. Protocols Tracking Plans have a changelog, so you can always see what changed.

Chord will import the Chord tracking plan into your Segment account as a Protocols Tracking Plan when you sign up. Chord will also connect the Protocols Tracking Plan to your front-end and back-end sources. You can use it to monitor your Segment events for possible issues that would impact your data reporting or third party integrations. You can also use it to generate your own analytics library, if you want to send events directly to Segment yourself.

Adding the Protocols Tracking Plan to Segment and connecting it to sources does not impact the actual events that Chord is sending to Segment. (Unless you've intentionally configured your Segment account to block events that are not in the Protocols Tracking Plan, which we don't recommend. We'll go into this in the next section.) Chord sends events to Segment that comply with the Chord tracking plan whether or not there is a Protocols Tracking Plan provisioned in your Segment account. Deleting an event from the Protocols Tracking Plan does not stop Chord from continuing to send the event, or your connected destinations from receiving the event.

When the Protocols Tracking Plan is connected to sources, you can monitor for violations, which are incoming events that don't match the Protocols Tracking Plan. It's up to you if you want to monitor this. Chord monitors for any event violations that impact data reporting. However, it's a good starting point for troubleshooting integrations. For example, if you're seeing an error with an integration that indicates an event property is missing, you might check for violations for that event. The violations could give you more information about how often the property is missing, when it started occuring, and the expected value of the property.

To view violations, navigate to a Segment source and select Schema > View Violations. You'll see a list of events and their violations:

If you see violations for events sent by Chord, your Protocols Tracking Plan could be out of date with Chord's tracking plan. Reach out to Chord to troubleshoot.

You can forward violations to a Segment source if you want to set up custom monitoring. You can also choose to block events that violate the Protocols Tracking Plan, but we advise against this. This can result in permanently lost data.