Sequential

Live: who is on your site now

Live shows on a world map how many visitors are on your site now, and from which countries. It is for a screen in your office.

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On this page

Open Live

  1. In the rail, click Live, or press G, then L. Or click the Live card on Workbench. Live shows the project that is open.
  2. For a screen in your office, click TV mode. It shows the map without the rail, at /live/tv. A bookmark of /live/tv?project=<project id> opens that project, not the project that the browser had open. Full screen, or the full screen of the browser (F11), fills the screen. Exit TV mode goes back to Live. Esc leaves full screen only.

The page shows:

  • On the site now: the number of visitors on the site now, and how many of them are new in the last minute, for example "3 new in the last minute";
  • "Active in the last 3 min";
  • a world map with a bubble for each country, and the 6 countries with the most visitors. Each country in the list is a link to Sessions from that country in the last 2 days: today and yesterday, as whole UTC days, not the last 3 minutes;
  • "No one on the site right now" when no visitor was active.

TV mode

TV mode is for a screen that stays on, for example in your office.

  • It shows the name Sequential, the Live mark with the project, and a clock.
  • It keeps the screen on while the page shows, where the browser allows it.
  • It loads itself again once a day. Every 10 minutes it moves the picture by 2 pixels, so that the screen does not burn in.
  • The TV stays signed in like any browser. Its own daily load is not activity of a person, so the sign-in still ends after the usual time without activity. Then the page says "Your session ended. Sign in again".

What Live counts

  • A visitor is active when the Sequential SDK sent an event from their browser in the last 3 minutes. Live counts each visitor once, also with two tabs open.
  • A visitor is new when their session started less than 1 minute ago.
  • Live counts only events that Sequential accepted from the Sequential browser SDK. It does not count events from PostHog, Mixpanel, your server or a mobile app. It does not count requests that Sequential refused, for example from bots. A replay upload does not add a visitor.
  • A visitor with no known country counts in the total, but not in a country.
  • Live counts up to 5,000 visitors in a project. Then the number shows as "5,000+".
  • When Sequential has too much work, the page can show Paused and keep the last picture.

Who can open it

  • Owners, admins, members and viewers of the project.
  • For a project that you cannot open, the page says "You cannot open Live in this project."

Turn Live off

Live is on for each project. To turn it off, go to Settings › Project and clear Live map. Only owners and admins can change it. While it is off, Sequential records nothing new for Live in the project. The data that it already holds expires in at most 5 minutes. The page says "Live is off for this project." An owner or an admin then sees Turn it on.

What Live keeps

  • For each active visitor, Sequential keeps a short keyed hash of the visitor id, the country code and when the session started. It keeps them in memory for at most 5 minutes.
  • The page gets only the counts and the country codes: no ids, no page addresses and no names.