Product analytics boundary

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Watchtower is an observability platform. Product analytics (funnels, retention, cohorts, feature flags, experiments, session-based growth metrics) is not built here: teams use PostHog for it and Watchtower links to it.

What Watchtower does

  • Stores errors, traces, logs, metrics, RUM and replays, and links them to each other and to releases.

  • Accepts deploy and feature-flag change events as annotations (change_events), so a regression can be tied to a flag flip. Flags are read, never evaluated or served.

  • Offers deep links from a user, session or issue to the matching PostHog person or recording when the project sets a PostHog base URL (docs/product/deep-links.md).

What Watchtower does not do

  • No funnels, retention curves, cohorts, paths or experiments.

  • No feature-flag service or experiment assignment.

  • No product-usage dashboards. Usage metering (docs/product/usage.md) counts platform consumption (bytes, records, queries), not end-user behaviour.

How this is checked

The parity matrix excludes these features with the PostHog reference (docs/research/parity/excluded.yaml), and cd go && go run ./tools/parity validate fails if an excluded feature is represented as built.

Updated