User Agent Populator

This transformation enhances incoming events by including browser & OS details from the $useragent property.

Note: This transformation is generally only needed when using clients that don't already set these properties, or when sending events directly from the server.

This transformation extracts the following properties from the provided $useragent:

Property	Description	Example
`$browser`	Name of the browser for the user	Chrome, Firefox
`$browser_version`	The version of the browser that was used	70, 79
`$os`	The operating system of the user	Windows, Mac OS X
`$browser_type`	The type of client that made the request	bot, browser

Requirements

Using this requires either PostHog Cloud with the data pipeline add-on, or a self-hosted PostHog instance running version 1.30.0 or later.

Self-hosting and not running 1.30.0? Find out how to update your self-hosted PostHog deployment.

Installation

In PostHog, click the "Data pipeline" tab in the left sidebar.
Search for 'User Agent Populator'.
Configure the transformation by clicking on the settings icon.
Click the toggle to enable the transformation.

Once the transformation has been configured and enabled, it will begin to transform all new events which come into PostHog.

Configuration

Before an transformation can be enabled in PostHog, it has to be configured.

Option	Description
`Can override existing browser related properties of event?` Type: string Required: False	If the ingested event already have $browser $browser_version properties in combination with $useragent the $browser, $browser_version properties will be re-populated with the value of $useragent
`Automatically read segment_userAgent property, automatically sent by Segment via analytics.js?` Type: choice Required: False	Segment's analytics.js library automatically sends a useragent property that Posthog sees as segment_userAgent. Enabling this causes this plugin to parse that property

Using the User Agent Populator

This transformation works by parsing the $useragent property on events as they are ingested. As a result, if an event is ingested without the $useragent (or $user-agent) property set, this transformation will do nothing. This property can be set using any of our client or server libraries.

Note: Most of our client libraries will already automatically extract the $browser, $browser_version, and $os properties, so there is no need to set the $useragent property when using these libraries.

One common use-case for this transformation is populating client information when sending events from the server-side. Typically, a UserAgent header will be set when a client sends a request to your server, which your server can then forward to PostHog with the $useragent property. This gives you an idea of what types of clients are using your service and allows you to create insights that filter based on these properties.