Sugar and Pendo Analytics - deactivating it

Hi everyone,

when testing Sugar 9, we (and also our Sugar partner) were very surprised to find that Sugar had implemented the service Pendo Analytics to analyze usage and user interaction with the system.

Why were we surprised? Because it was just communicated very poorly.

After we had discovered the tool when testing Sugar 9.0.0, we found only one mention in Sugar's own resources (this blogpost), which didn't make things clearer, though. We looked for further information in the release notes - but nothing there. That would have been important! As admin or developer I want to know about a change or addition like this. As I already said, even our Sugar partner was surprised, because they, too, didn't know anything about it.

We are aware that the data, Pendo gathers, is anonymized and used to help Sugar to better understand how we work with their product. But I want to have the freedom to choose whether I want that or not. When using my computer, iPhone or whatever, I can actively decide and set whether I want to share usage data with the manufacturers or not. And in this case I'm not making that decision just for myself but for all my 150+ users.
Not only did Sugar not communicate the news properly, they also didn't communicate how to deactivate that "feature", if you don't want data to be submitted. Gladly, we have found the way to accomplish that, anyways, but I would wished to have that information from Sugar directly and not have my developer dig for that all by himself (see the info-box below). 

You can deactivate it in the config.php under analytics and comment out your ID:

'analytics' => 
array (
'enabled' => false,
'connector' => 'Pendo',
// 'id' => 'xxx',
),


after a Quick repair it is deactivated.

In my opinion the best and exemplary way would have been the ability to set this via the Admin page, so you don't even have to go to code level to change that. Maybe Sugar will come up with that - I really hope so, at least.

We are satisfied with the system in general, but, sorry, Sugar, this was just a very disappointing and poor performance, as it could be read as if you were trying to keep that under the radar intentionally.

I would be very curious about your opinions on the matter!

Best wishes,
Julia

  • Hi,

    Thanks for that information! I had completely missed this in the release notes and share your positions. 

    We're probably not foing to disable Pendo entirely, but have you also encountered very long response times? I actually noticed Pendo because my browser was hanging on "waiting for pendo...".

    Damien Pochon

    CRM & Digital consultant @ ITS4U Group

  • Thanks for pinging this thread again, I had missed it too, and we did notice a significant slowdown in performance with v9, and even more so with v11. I am going to see if turning off marketing extras and analytics helps.

    Now that I think about it, I often saw "waiting for app.pend.io" at the bottom of my browser.

    I added these to my config_override.php:

    $sugar_config['analytics'] =
      array (
        'enabled' => false,
        'connector' => 'Pendo',
        //'id' => '<the id>',
      );
    $sugar_config['marketing_extras_enabled'] = false;