Step 3: Defining data contracts for data governance

Establishing robust data contracts early in your migration process sets up your data pipeline to maintain data quality, consistency, and governance. Hightouch provides a powerful tool for defining and managing these contracts through data contracts.

Hightouch includes contracts with Events at no additional cost. While it's a paid, premium feature in some event tracking platforms, we think data governance is crucial for collecting and activating high-fidelity data, and we want to enable everyone using Hightouch Events to build for success.

Understanding data contracts

Hightouch's contracts consists of two main components:

1. Contract Events: These define individual events, including their name, type, description, and validation schema.
2. Contracts: A set of contract events that can be applied to an event source.

Contracts can be used for multiple sources. This structure allows for flexible and granular control over your event data.

Creating data contracts in Hightouch

For each event you want to validate, follow the instructions to set up event contracts.

Hightouch contracts use JSON Schema Draft 7, and contracts can be created with our graphical editor or by editing JSON directly in the app.

Event versioning

Hightouch data contracts support event versioning, which is crucial when migrating from another platform or when you expect to have multiple versions of your application available, as is common with mobile applications.

See these docs for help in implementing additional versions of a contract event after initial setup.

Best practices for data contracts

Many customers are concerned with losing out on data by implementing data contracts too early in setting up event collection, or are worried about devoting time to creating contracts when there's other work to be done downstream.

1. Start with core events: Begin by defining contracts for your most critical events, such as those used for key business metrics, or for events that you expect to monitor more closely due to likelihood of errors.
2. Implement blocking gradually: Data contracts enable you to allow, filter, or block events. You can define contracts, and allow those events through with a warning until you've fine-tuned the contracts and built confidence. At that point, you can shift to filtering or blocking the event.
3. Collaborate: Involve stakeholders from different teams to ensure the contracts meet various needs across the organization, and so that all stakeholders understand the value of data governance.

By leveraging data contracts, you're setting a strong foundation for data quality and governance in your new event tracking setup. These contracts will help maintain consistency, catch errors early, and provide clear documentation for all data consumers in your organization.

In the next section, we'll cover how to validate your migration to ensure that your new Hightouch Events setup is capturing data correctly and consistently with your previous system.