So you’re ready to install Heap! Before jumping into our installation guides, we recommend reviewing the items listed below to plan the best Heap implementation for your organization. If you’re reading this for the first time and you’ve already set up Heap, don’t worry – you can configure all of these things post-install as well.

Determine your Project & Environment Model

What are projects and environments?

Your Heap account is structured in a set of projects and environments. Projects can be thought of as blank slates that are completely independent of another. Environments are subsets of projects that share events, segments, and charts, but which do not share any data.

When you sign up for Heap, you automatically get one Main project with two environments: Production and Development. During implementation, you’ll need to decide if this default setup satisfies your requirements, or if you will need to add more.

Which project and environment setup is right for me?

Generally speaking, most businesses find that keeping all of their data in the Main project and using the two default environments to separate their production and testing data works best. This setup allows you to analyze all of your user interactions in one place. This is essential for tracking each user through their journey converting from a visitor to a customer, using different products, and interacting across different platforms.

If you’re still unsure if the one project, two environment model is best for you, read on for our pros, cons, and use cases for adding additional projects and/or environments.

Pros of multiple projects

• It’s significantly easier to organize events and categories
• You can give your Heap users access to only the projects and data that they need access to
• You don’t need to worry about including filters on aggregate charts for the different product lines

Cons of multiple projects

• No aggregate reporting in Heap (though can be done downstream with Heap Connect)
• No way to see cross-product user behavior
• You have to complete the setup process for each project (identify users, create basic reporting, set up basic events etc.)
• You can’t deploy Heap more than once on a single instance, so you must decide on a single destination for the data

Use cases for multiple projects and/or environments

Here are a few cases where we recommend adding additional environments or projects.

• You have a complex staged deployment process. In this case, we recommend creating multiple environments to align with each stage in the process, such as Local, Integration, Functional, UAT, etc.
• You have an internal application used by employees only, and you don’t want that data to appear when analyzing your users. In this case, you should create an additional, separate project to house data for that application.
• You have global sites or apps for different regions. A setup with a single project and multiple environments is best suited for this, so you can share common data types (events, properties, etc.) but keep analysis separate.
• You have a set of brands or products that don’t share a common user base, such as owning multiple businesses. In this case, you’ll want to set up multiple environments and projects for each business.

Complete steps for setting up new projects and environments can be found in Projects and Environments. If you’re planning to use multiple environments, note that you’ll need to copy the correct environment ID from Heap into your app during installation.

Data Privacy Legislation Compliance

If you need to meet privacy compliance requirements (including GDPR and CCPA) with your implementation of Heap, we recommend reviewing our Data Privacy section prior to installation.

Ready to get Heap?

The first step to installing Heap is to create your Heap account. Once you’ve done so, your installation snippet will be provided for you to install Heap on your website or app. From here, check out the list of links in Installation for your platforms of choice.

Once you’ve installed Heap on each of your platforms, head over to Setting Up Heap to get your Heap account up and running and start analyzing!