Sightline
An Adobe Analytics debugger that decodes beacons as they fire — so validating an implementation takes minutes instead of an afternoon of squinting at query strings.
- Type
- Browser extension
- Surface
- Chromium / Edge DevTools
- Status
- Internal tool, in use
- Role
- Design & build
The problem
Adobe Analytics implementations fail quietly. A beacon fires with the wrong eVar, a prop stops populating after a release, a page double-tracks — and none of it throws an error. The data keeps flowing, it just stops being true.
The standard way to catch this is to open the network tab, find the request, and read a URL-encoded string of forty-odd parameters named v12 and c7. It works. It also means QA is bottlenecked on whoever has memorized the variable map, and subtle regressions ship because nobody wants to do that check on every page.
What it does
- Intercepts analytics beacons as they fire and decodes them into readable, named variables rather than raw query parameters.
- Shows the full sequence of hits on a page, making double-tracking and misfiring events obvious at a glance.
- Surfaces what's actually populated versus what's expected, turning a memory exercise into a diff.
Why it matters beyond analytics
Sightline is a small tool, but it comes from the conviction that runs through everything else here: data quality problems are almost always collection problems, and collection problems are invisible unless you build something that makes them visible.
The same logic scales up. Whether it's a tag on a marketing page or a feature feeding a production model, if you can't observe what's being captured, you can't trust anything downstream of it.
Current status
Sightline runs as an unpacked extension in Edge and is used day-to-day rather than distributed. A packaged public release is on the roadmap — if that would be useful to you, say so and it moves up the list.
kevin@kevrichard.com →