September 2015 Summaries

Snowplow has been refining its approach to handling event timestamps to address complexities in accurately determining when events occur. Historically, Snowplow relied on the collector_tstamp, which marks when an event is received by the collector, as a reliable timestamp. However, as Snowplow's platform evolved, particularly with the introduction of historical event replays and delayed event sending, the collector_tstamp proved insufficient for precise time tracking. To address this, Snowplow introduced the true_tstamp to accurately capture the exact time an event occurred, while also developing the derived_tstamp to offer a more robust timestamp for cases where the exact event time is unknown. These changes aim to improve the accuracy of event time tracking and will be incorporated into the upcoming Snowplow R71 Stork-Billed Kingfisher release, ultimately enhancing analysis by prioritizing the derived_tstamp over the previous collector_tstamp.