Real-time event lag monitor for Adobe Analytics and Amplitude

A marketing analyst or product manager notices a spike — or suspects one — but their analytics dashboard is still showing data from 90 minutes ago. They have no idea if the spike already peaked, is still climbing, or was a tagging error that only just fired. The moment they need clarity is precisely the moment their analytics tool goes dark.

This gap persists because Adobe Analytics and Amplitude are architected around batch ingestion pipelines. Their revenue comes from storing and querying historical data at scale — real-time streaming is a fundamentally different infrastructure investment, and they have no incentive to cannibalize their 'add-on' real-time reporting features by building something better into the base product. The buyer (enterprise IT or the analytics team that negotiated the contract) is rarely the person sitting at a screen at 2pm on a Tuesday watching a campaign drop.

What users are actually complaining about isn't that real-time analytics doesn't exist — it's that they have no visibility into how stale their current data is. 'No clear indication of when they will become available' is a direct quote. Right now, an analyst either waits and guesses, or they build a brittle internal Slack bot on top of raw event streams they may not even have access to.

Without something watching data freshness continuously, a team launching a paid campaign has no early warning system. They might spend four hours and thousands in ad budget before the dashboard catches up enough to show the funnel is broken. That cost is concrete and it recurs every launch, every incident, every A/B test cutover.

What to build

Build a lightweight agent that connects to an Adobe Analytics or Amplitude workspace via API, continuously compares expected event volume against what's actually landed, and sends a Slack or email alert the moment data freshness drops below a user-defined threshold — with a simple dashboard showing exactly how many minutes behind each data source currently is.

Where to start

Start with Amplitude customers specifically, because Amplitude exposes ingestion metadata in its API more cleanly than Adobe Analytics does, giving you a working product faster and a cleaner demo to show the first ten paying customers.

The hard part

Getting reliable access to event ingestion timestamps — not just the reported data — requires API permissions that some enterprise analytics accounts lock down, meaning the first sales conversations will frequently hit an IT gatekeeper before you can even demo the core value.

How it makes money

Monthly subscription per workspace monitored, starting around $99/month for up to three data sources, scaling by number of sources and alert destinations.