Key Concepts
Sessions
The SDK produces ‘sessions’ of zipped performance data which are uploaded to the GameBench server. By default, i.e. assuming default configuration values and with no code being necessary, a session is started when the app is started or foregrounded, and is stopped when the app goes to the background. This is called “the automatic session”. But if you’d rather start and stop a session in response to player events - to their entering and exiting an area of gameplay, say - then it’s easy to do that using our APIs.
Metrics
A metric is a specific type of performance measurement that is typically sampled at a regular interval. Which metrics get sampled and the intervals at which they are sampled is defined by your configuration.
Markers
Markers are used to record events within a session and will appear in the session timelines shown in the GameBench web dashboard. A marker has two bits of data - an event type, and a name. The only event types presently supported are ‘start’ and ‘stop’ which are used to delimit periods of time within a session. If your game is built with Unity you will see start and stop markers generated automatically each time the active scene changes.
Tags
Each session has a collection of text properties known as ’tags’ which can be used to group related sessions together and which are searchable in the web dashboard. Tags are settable both at run time and at build time through configuration.