Microsoft’s new developer analytics tool Clarity takes aim at Google Optimize and others

Kareem Anderson

As Microsoft becomes further entrenched in its cloud services aspirations the company is looking to expand its portfolio of applications that leverage its newfound computing prowess.

Enter Microsoft Clarity.

According to a report from Venture Beat, Microsoft will soon be rolling out a new analytics tool designed to aid developers in scaling human purchasing, engagement, consumption and other behaviors. Despite being a similarly packaged A/B testing tool with the likes of Google’s Optimize 360 and Optimizely, Microsoft is pitching Clarity as a more granular view of A/B metric reading.

Microsoft’s Clarity plans to a small of a bit of JavaScript added to HTML to enable developer visible metrics such as mouse movement, touch gestures, click events, page impressions and more, to help the service stand out from the increasingly crowded analytics crowd.

The specific page reading function is being called Session Replay, but Microsoft is also bundling an additional service called Interesting Sessions which will use Azure AI and Machine Learning to process unique or abnormal user behavior.

Aside from more user-end facing analytics, Clarity will also allow developers access to heatmap readouts and other session-related analytics that group sessions for a better scope of user behaviors while identifying aggregated data.

Per, what is becoming the norm, Microsoft has already open sourced the JavaScript library that instruments pages and the code can be found on its recently acquired repository, GitHub.

Despite being partly open-sourced, Clarity has yet to be rolled out to the public and current tester have to be approved before being put into the beta program.