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Data Governance

Maintain data quality, enforce standards, and control access to your data with Mixpanel’s comprehensive data governance features.

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Lexicon: Data Dictionary

Lexicon is a data dictionary that stores descriptions of events and their properties. Project owners and admins can add/manage descriptions for all events and properties and organize data for clarity and discoverability. To open Lexicon, select the Data Management icon on the right side of the top navigation menu and then select Lexicon.

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Lexicon Structure

Tracked Data:

• Events
• Event Properties
• Profile Properties

Computed Data:

• Cohorts
• Custom Events
• Lookup Tables
• Formulas
• Behaviors

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Events

Events are actions a user performs in your application or website.

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Event Properties

Event properties describe details about events, such as distinct_id or browser.

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Profile Properties

Profile properties describe details about your users, such as username or email address. If you have Group Analytics enabled, you will see a dropdown on the Profile Properties tab that will let you select any Group Types that you may have configured.

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Managing Data in Lexicon

Renaming Properties

After you ingest raw data into a project, you cannot rename it. However, you can change the display names of events, event properties, and user profile properties to control how they appear in the UI.The system dynamically renders these display names on the front end and does not modify the underlying data in the project’s data store or affect how the data appears in exports.

Dropping Data

Only project owners may drop and undrop data from the Lexicon. You cannot recover event data after you drop it.

In Lexicon, you can intercept and drop incoming events or properties. Mixpanel won’t store any new data for the event or property you select to drop.Sample use cases:

• Sensitive data: If you accidentally send sensitive data, such as passwords or credit card information, you can drop the event or property
• Cost and Time Efficiency: Being able to drop events and properties that are no longer useful directly from Lexicon is easier than implementing changes to your code base
• Better Organization: Dropping unnecessary events and properties optimizes your code for a clean and streamlined project implementation

Dropping Events:

1. Select an event to drop
2. Click Drop
3. Confirm in the warning dialog
4. The status of the event indicates Dropped

It takes a few hours for Mixpanel to process the dropped event. When an event is dropped, all events of that type that have previously been ingested will still show in the interface.

Undropping Events:

1. Select a dropped event (look for “Dropped” in the Status column)
2. Click Undrop
3. The “Status” column no longer contains “Dropped”

Hiding Data

You must have an admin or owner project role to hide and unhide data from the Lexicon.

In Lexicon, you can hide any events or properties. Unlike dropping data, hiding data does not affect data ingestion; any events/properties that are hidden will continue to be ingested in your project and count toward your data allowance.Key behaviors:

• A hidden entity will not be indexed in your event/properties menu in the query builder
• Inactive events and properties (not fired in 30 days) will also be hidden
• Hidden events will be excluded from your query results
• Hidden events won’t appear in “All Events” or as intermediate steps in Flows reports

Hiding Events and Properties:

1. Select one or more visible events, event properties, or profile properties
2. Select Hide
3. Confirm hiding in the dialog
4. The event or property status changes to “Hidden”

Show Events and Properties:

1. Select one or more hidden events, event properties, or profile properties
2. Select Unhide
3. The event or property status changes to “Visible”

If you wish to use a hidden entity in your report, you may manually select the entity by searching in the events/properties menu and then clicking “Show Hidden Events/Properties”.

Merging Data

In Lexicon, only project owners can merge events and event properties. User profile properties cannot be merged.

By merging events, you can streamline your implementation and simplify report analysis. For example, if your iOS app sends “Purchase” and your Android app sends “purchase item”, you can merge them into a single event.Merging Events:

1. Select the events to merge
2. Click Merge
3. In the “MERGE SELECTED EVENTS INTO…” section, specify which event Mixpanel should consider as the new unique event
4. Click Merge
5. The merged event appears and the “Status” column indicates “Merged”

After you merge an event into another, it no longer appears in reports or custom events that reference it. Update those reports with the new merged event to maintain accuracy.

Autocapture events (displayed as “[Auto] Page View” and “[Auto] Element Click”) cannot be merged.

Unmerge Events:

1. Select the merged event to unmerge
2. Click Unmerge
3. The merged event appears as the original two distinct events

Merging Properties:

1. Select the properties to merge
2. Click Merge
3. Specify which property Mixpanel should recognize as the newly merged property name
4. Click Merge

Verify Data (Enterprise)

Customers on an Enterprise plan can access the Verified Data feature.

Verified Data in Mixpanel allows designated project owners and admins to add Verified badges to certain Events, Behaviors, Formulas, and Custom Events. This signals to other users within your project that this data has been vetted and can be confidently used for analysis and reporting.How it Works:

1. Navigate to Lexicon
2. Go to any event, behavior, formula, or custom event
3. In the top right corner, click the Verify button
4. Now, whenever end users are creating reports or browsing data in Lexicon, they will see a Verified icon next to this data item

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Export and Import Lexicon Data

Export Lexicon Data

Project owners, admins, analysts, and consumers can click Export in Lexicon to receive a CSV file via email that contains the events and properties, and/or user profile properties data from a project.In the Export panel, you can select:

• Events & Properties and/or
• User Profile Properties

The requester will receive an email with a link to download a single CSV file. This link remains active for 14 days. Each CSV file can contain up to 5,000 events, 2,000 properties per event, and 2,000 user profile properties.

CSV Import

Project owners and admins can export a CSV of their Lexicon changes, make changes, and import that CSV back into Lexicon.To import CSV files, they must be in the exported CSV format, otherwise the file will be rejected.Once you’ve made your modifications:

1. Select your CSV file
2. Review Events, Event Properties, and/or User Profile Properties
3. Import into Lexicon

Event and property descriptions and metadata that are already in Lexicon will be overwritten by descriptions and metadata for matching event and property names.

Third-Party Imports

Segment Import:When importing from Segment Protocols, you’ll need your Segment Token and Workspace. Find your Segment Token at Settings > Access Management > Tokens.

1. In Lexicon, select Import from Segment
2. Enter your Token & Workspace
3. Select the Plan you want to import from Segment
4. Review the Events and Profile Properties
5. Import your Segment Plan into Lexicon

Avo.app Import:To import from Avo.app, enable an integration with Mixpanel. You’ll need:

• Mixpanel Project ID
• Mixpanel Service Account Username & Secret (Owner or Admin role required)

mParticle Import:

1. Navigate to your Data Plan and select Download Plan Version
2. In Lexicon, click Import > mParticle
3. Select the downloaded JSON file
4. Review and Import data

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Data Standards (Enterprise)

Data Standards is a Data Governance feature that helps organizations enforce naming and metadata standards on events ingested into Mixpanel. This helps improve event consistency, easy navigation, and user trust in using data for analysis.

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Enabling Data Standards

To define data standards, navigate to the Data Standards tab in Lexicon and configure rules such as:

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Viewing Compliancy Status

For every event in your project, Mixpanel will automatically evaluate against your defined data standards. The compliancy status is displayed in Lexicon, allowing Data Governors to:

• Identify compliant and non-compliant events at a glance
• Filter/sort events based on their compliancy status
• Take corrective actions by updating metadata directly within Lexicon

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Event Approval (Enterprise)

Event Approval is a Data Governance feature for organizations that want visibility and control over all new events sent to their Mixpanel project. The feature is a project-level setting that hides new events by default and notifies admins when those new events come in.

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Enabling Event Approval

To enable Event Approval:

1. Navigate to Lexicon
2. Scroll to Event Approval under the Data Governance section
3. Click the Event Approval toggle
4. Input email addresses or aliases to be notified when a new event is ingested
5. Optionally set up a Slack channel for notifications
6. Enable new property detection if desired

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Lexicon Workflow

When an admin receives a notification that new events have been ingested:

1. Click the “View New Events” button in the notification
2. This takes you to a Lexicon view of hidden events
3. New events will have a “New” tag and be sorted to the top
4. Take actions such as marking the event as visible, adding a description, or a tag

Events are marked as “New” when:

• It hasn’t been modified
• It is hidden
• It was created within the last 30 days

Properties are marked as “New” when:

• It was created within the last 30 days

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Data Views (Enterprise)

Data Views allow you to manage data access for a group of users within a single Mixpanel project. Project Owners and Admins can create and edit Data Views and determine access for privacy and productivity purposes.

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Use Cases

Teams or Functional Areas

You have a Mixpanel project that contains all of your data. Engineering, Marketing, Support, and various product teams all use Mixpanel on a regular basis. Each team can have a Data View filtering for relevant data.

Separate Customer from Internal Data

Create a Data View for customer data by excluding data tracked by your internal users/employees. Create another Data View for just your internal users. By doing this, you no longer have to remember to add cohorts or filters each time you create a Board, Report, or Cohort.

Regions or Geo-Based Teams

For a global organization with multiple offices, regional teams might need access to data from only their region. E.g., The marketing team in the Asia region would like to target only Asian customers and should not have access to US customers’ data.

Verified Data Only

Teams that want to closely manage events that are included in all their analysis can either include or exclude the specific events in the Data View definition.

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Create Data View

To create a new Data View:

1. Navigate to Project Settings
2. Click on + Create Data View in the top right
3. Add a name and description (max 255 characters)
4. Click Save

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Manage Data View

Default Data View

All projects have a global Data View called “All Project Data.” This Data View has no data filters and gives users access to all the data in a project.The “All Project Data” Data View starts as the default Data View of a project for any new users added. You can change which Data View is default by checking the box next to the Workspace name and selecting Set Default.

Visibility and Editing Controls

The Overview tab displays details about the Data View including name, description, editing controls, visibility, creator name, date created, and URL.Editing Controls:

• Restricted: Prevent other Admins from editing the Data View settings and filters
• Unrestricted: Allow Admins to edit the Data View settings and filters

Visibility:

• Public: Allow project members to discover your Data View in the Data View Library and self join
• Private: Prevent project members from seeing your Data View in the Library and self joining

After creation, Editing Controls and Visibility can only be changed by the Data View creator or a Project Owner.

Manage Data View Filters

Filters determine what data is accessible within a Data View.You can apply multiple event, event property, and user profile property filters to a Data View.

Add Users or Teams

Add Users:

1. Click + Add User
2. Select individual project members from the modal
3. Remove users by selecting the box next to their name and clicking Remove

Add Teams:

1. Click on the Teams tab
2. Add or remove teams from a Data View
3. Any project member in the team will have access to the Data View

If you set up your Identity Provider to connect to Mixpanel with Single Sign-On, you can define which project members are assigned to which teams. This helps control who has access to what data at scale.

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Data View Library

Click on the name of your project in the upper-right corner, then “Data View Library”. The Data View Library allows you to:

• See the Data Views you have joined
• Create new Data Views
• Join other public Data Views

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Data Views Limits

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Data Classification (Enterprise)

Marking properties as classified limits which users can view them. Only Project Owners and Admins can mark a property as classified.

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Mark Properties as Classified Data

1. Navigate to event properties or user profile properties tabs in Lexicon
2. Select a property or group of properties
3. Click Mark Classified
4. Confirm in the pop-up

When you mark a property as classified, the Status column will indicate that the property is classified alongside its visibility state.

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Manage Classified Data Viewing Permissions

For Individual Users

1. Go to Project Settings
2. Select the “Project Users” tab
3. In the Current Users table, the Classified Data column indicates which users have permission
4. Click the Can View check box in a user’s row to update their permission

For Teams

1. Navigate to Organization Settings
2. Go to the Users & Teams tab
3. Click on the team for which you wish to manage permissions
4. Manage the team’s access to Classified Data for each project

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User Experience with Classified Data

Users that cannot view properties marked as Classified Data can see which specific properties are marked as classified in Lexicon, but cannot use such properties as filters or breakdowns. In Boards: If a report contains any event or property marked as classified, users without the “Can View” option will see a warning. They can click on a Board card to access the full report and determine what properties are preventing them from viewing a report. In Analysis Reports: Classified properties won’t be visibly different when building a report, but if used by a user without the “Can View” option enabled, a warning will be displayed.

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Query Volumes and Filtering

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Viewing Query Volumes

In Lexicon, you can see the total UI and API queries in the last 30 days for any data types and sort by them. This data lets you easily discover:

• Parts of your implementation that are most valuable
• Parts that are not being used
• Which events and properties you should drop

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Filtering Events and Properties

Lexicon provides several options to filter your events, custom events, event properties, and profile properties:

• Visible or hidden events
• Dropped events
• Merged events
• Tags
• Your defined events
• Autotracked events
• Default Mixpanel events

These filtering options help you arrive at the most useful data to analyze your performance.