Create and configure a GA4 Google analytics property for SoftMeter

Login to Google Analytics, go to Admin (last menu item on the left), and under the 2nd column click on "+ Create property".

Give a property name, and select your timezone.

If you want to monitor more than one desktop app, we suggest that you create one property for each app.

GA creates by default a GA4 type of property.

Fill in the 2nd page of details and press Create.

The new property is created. On the left, you can see the Admin menu for this property.

You will arrive at the Data streams page, where you are asked to Choose a platform.

Select Web as the type of stream.

Fill in the website URL (any URL will do), as the Stream name put your application's name + " stream" and click on Create.

Select the manual install tab.

The next page will show you your measurement ID (your GA tracking ID) which you will need to provide to SoftMeter, together with the API secret of GA4.

In your application, call SoftMeter using your Measurement ID and your API secret.

call the function setOptions():

setOptions("ApiSecret=Your-Api-Secret-As-given-from-GA-administration-config");

call the function start():

start(appName, appVersion, appLicense, appEdition, MeasurementID, userGaveConsent);

Compile and run your application and you should start seeing the calls in the GA4 real-time report.

The default is 2 months but you can change it to 14 months. Go to Admin -> Data settings -> Data retention.

While you are implementing SoftMeter into your application, turn off the filtering of internal traffic.

Go to Admin -> Data settings -> Data filters, and switch the Internal traffic filter to Inactive.

SoftMeter PRO edition sends the Application and System metadata to GA4 as custom dimensions.

The medadata are sent under the User scope and have names that start with "sm_".

The list of metadata sent is the following:

To see this information in the GA4 reports you will need to first register these custom dimensions on the GA4 admin section.

We recommend that you first run your application (with SoftMeter) and start creating the custom dimensions after 24 hours. This will allow Google Analytics to prefill in the drop-down list "User property" and you will be able to pick values instead of typing them.

Go to Admin -> Custom definitions -> and click Create custom definitions to create them one by one.

In the form, first, select User as the scope, then filter the list of available dimensions by "sm_" and select the custom dimension, giving it also a name.

At the end you will have a list of custom dimensions like the following:

It can take 24 or more hours for Google Analytics to make these new custom fields available to your reports.