Open a raw live view on a consumer app at lunchtime and you will see a river: screen_view, button_tap, video_quartile, experiment_exposure, a heart-beat from a forgotten debug flag. New analysts often try to graph the river. The graph looks important because it moves.
Volume is a property of instrumentation, marketing spend, and how chatty the SDK was configured to be. It is not, by itself, a product fact. In the atelier we ask a colder question: which names would you still defend if the river halved tomorrow?
Three sieves
First, jobs not screens. If an event cannot be paired with a sentence a user would recognise — started a trial, attached a card, finished a workout — it stays in the noise pile. Screen_view of “HomeV3” is a breadcrumb for debugging, not a claim for Monday.
Second, cardinality. A property that mints a new value for every session is a novel, not a dimension. We freeze it or we hash it out of the dictionary. Third, ownership. An event nobody will update after the next navigation rewrite is already dead; it just has not stopped firing.
A practical hour
Take one day’s export. Strike every event that fired more than once a minute per active user unless you can name the job. You will feel unfaithful to the engineers who added those taps. Thank them later with a freeze list, not with a dashboard that pretends every tap was a decision.
What remains is small enough to put on a readout. The rest can live in a debug view. App Analytics becomes quieter, which is usually the point.