Setting up Mixpanel in ASP.Net and deploying to multiple environments with Azure

In order to make clear decisions about your product you need to have quantitive data to base these decisions on. Setting up analytics early on will give you the best chance to make the correct decisions.

Our goal is to set-up Mixpanel across different development environments and be able to confidently test our analytics data before pushing code to production.

Although the general approach in this guide should work just as well with other analytics packages, I have always found Mixpanel to be the most pleasant to work with.

We have now successfully set up Mixpanel locally and laid the foundation for us to create a more flexibile analytics set-up.

Now that we have Mixpanel running locally, we want to make sure it runs successfully on our Developement server too.

After deploying our local changes, and adding the new Application settings, we can now test that Mixpanel is successfully receiving our events.

Now we have Mixpanel working successfully on our Development server, we can get it running on our Production server.

Now we are all set. We have a Development project where we can confidently test our product’s analytics data without polluting the data from our Production project.

A final improvement we can make is to create an on/off switch for Mixpanel in our Development environment. Even in small development teams, the data points can get hit really hard, using up your allowance in Mixpanel for no real gain. In reality, developing analytics usually happens in fits and bursts, so having control in Azure to turn Mixpanel on when you need it can be really beneficial.

Mixpanel is now off by default in our Development environment, yet easy to switch on when we need to work on our analytics code. In our Production environment Mixpanel is always on, collecting data for us while we sleep.

Enjoy! 🎉

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