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GAMESOPS04-BP01 Instrument the game to detect and monitor player-impacting issues - Games Industry Lens
Implementation guidance

GAMESOPS04-BP01 Instrument the game to detect and monitor player-impacting issues

In addition to responding to social media and player reports of issues, instrument your game with monitoring solutions to detect and investigate player-impacting issues.

Level of risk exposed if this best practice is not established: High

Implementation guidance

No amount of testing can identify every issue in a game. Games are usually launched with known issues that are planned to be gradually fixed with the next release of the game. Known and reproducible issues are straightforward to address and fix. To assist with identifying such issues, game clients should implement player activity tracking, app logging, and reporting in various strategic places to assist the backend team identify client-side issues. The ability to find such issues early assists the game developers troubleshoot and fix the issue before it becomes widespread. The data and logs reported by the tracking code should never include personally identifiable information (PII), and they should only contain game specific metadata that assist with debugging. 

Implement an observability solution for detecting and responding to issues such as game crashes or bugs. You can use Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics to create canaries that can monitor the health of your player-facing backend game services. You can instrument your backend services with AWS X-Ray to trace requests across distributed services, and send your custom logs and metrics to Amazon CloudWatch.

Third-party solutions, such as Backtrace.io and Sentry, are popular solutions for error reporting in games. Application performance monitoring (APM) solutions from partners such as New Relic, Splunk, Datadog, and Honeycomb.io are also popular.

The game's live operations team and community managers should also monitor various social networks and channels to check for player feedback, complaints, and bug reports in addition to the official support channels. Review and attempt to reproduce every game-specific complaint, or send them to the QA team for review. If reproducible, escalate the issue to the game developers for their troubleshooting and a fix before it impacts the larger player base.

Implementation steps

  • Implement monitoring solutions: Use monitoring tools to detect player-impacting issues and respond quickly.

  • Track player activity and logs: Instrument game clients to log player activity and report issues, and verify that no personally identifiable information (PII) is included.

  • Use third-party and AWS tools: Use tools like CloudWatch, X-Ray, and third-party solutions for error reporting and performance monitoring, and monitor social media for player feedback and bug reports.