---
type: "post"
id: "speed-insights-and-web-analytics-now-support-custom-9580f4"
slug: "speed-insights-and-web-analytics-now-support-custom-9580f4"
title: "Speed Insights and Web Analytics now support custom environments."
description: "Vercel says Speed Insights and Web Analytics now attribute deployment data to custom environments such as staging, QA, and canary rather than grouping it under Preview."
retrieval_nugget: "Vercel says Speed Insights and Web Analytics now attribute deployment data to custom environments such as staging, QA, and canary rather than grouping it under Preview. Teams on Pro and Enterprise can inspect those environments separately through existing dashboards, command-line queries, and selected APIs without new instrumentation or configuration."
published_at: "2026-11-10"
updated_at: "2026-11-10"
record_date: "2026-11-10"
date_kind: "published_at"
topics: ["observability","developer-tools"]
entities: ["Vercel","Speed Insights","Web Analytics"]
related_patterns: []
novelty_label: "new_fact"
what_changed: "Vercel Speed Insights and Web Analytics now attribute metrics to custom environments, enabling separate tracking for staging, QA, and canary deployments."
prior_refs: []
source_url: "https://vercel.com/changelog/speed-insights-and-web-analytics-now-support-custom-environments"
source_urls: ["https://vercel.com/changelog/speed-insights-and-web-analytics-now-support-custom-environments"]
schema_version: "newruntime-agent-readable-v0.2"
stable_id: "post:speed-insights-and-web-analytics-now-support-custom-9580f4"
status: "published"
visuals: []
editor: {"role":"editor","name":"Andrey Reshetnikov","profile":"https://newruntime.com/owner-profile.md","profile_json":"https://newruntime.com/owner-profile.json","same_as":["https://www.linkedin.com/in/reshetnikov1/","https://t.me/lapetuse"]}
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markdown_url: "https://newruntime.com/posts/speed-insights-and-web-analytics-now-support-custom-9580f4.md"
---

# Speed Insights and Web Analytics now support custom environments.

## Retrieval answer

Vercel says Speed Insights and Web Analytics now attribute deployment data to custom environments such as staging, QA, and canary rather than grouping it under Preview. Teams on Pro and Enterprise can inspect those environments separately through existing dashboards, command-line queries, and selected APIs without new instrumentation or configuration.

## Summary
Vercel says Speed Insights and Web Analytics now attribute deployment data to custom environments such as staging, QA, and canary rather than grouping it under Preview. Teams on Pro and Enterprise can inspect those environments separately through existing dashboards, command-line queries, and selected APIs without new instrumentation or configuration.

## What happened
Vercel has added full custom-environment support to Speed Insights and Web Analytics. The release changes the way the two products classify data captured from deployments that use a custom environment. Previously, Vercel says, data from those deployments was attributed to Preview. It is now attributed to the custom environment from which it originated.

The distinction applies to teams that maintain deployment stages beyond the standard Production and Preview categories. Vercel names staging, QA, and canary environments as examples. Instead of adding their traffic and performance signals to Preview, a team can inspect each of those environments independently and keep them separate from both Preview and Production. A visual example accompanying the changelog shows custom entries including staging and pre-production alongside All Environments, Production, and Preview.

Vercel describes several places where the newly attributed data can be used. In the Speed Insights and Web Analytics dashboards, the Environment dropdown lets a user select a custom environment. The `vc metrics` command can query the data from the CLI. The query builder can filter and break down results by environment. For Web Analytics, but not Speed Insights, Vercel also lists the Aggregation API as a programmatic access path.

This is not a new telemetry product or an expansion of the measured event set. Vercel explicitly says that the change affects attribution only: no new data points are collected. It also says no configuration changes are required. In practical terms, an existing project with custom environments should gain a clearer dimension for reviewing the data it already sends to these products, rather than needing to deploy a new tracking implementation.

Custom environments are available on Vercel's Pro and Enterprise plans. The changelog does not announce a separate price, an additional analytics tier, or a revised quota. It presents the release as full analytics support for an existing deployment-environment capability on those plans. Teams that use only Production and Preview will not gain an additional environment category from the change; the effect is for deployments already organized around custom environment names.

The release is also deliberately scoped. It does not promise that staging or canary metrics will resemble production traffic, improve performance, or automatically diagnose rollout failures. Its concrete change is that the products preserve the deployment-environment label instead of assigning custom-environment data to Preview. That makes environment-specific filtering possible across the listed interfaces.

## What the archive adds
New Runtime's earlier coverage examined Vercel's custom monitors for query-based metrics, threshold or anomaly detection, filters, grouping, CLI creation, and alerts ([October 27, 2026 note](https://newruntime.com/posts/vercel-observability-adds-custom-monitors-with-threshold-and-bb5dca/)). It also covered Vercel's AI Traffic view for crawler and assistant requests ([November 4, 2026 note](https://newruntime.com/posts/vercel-s-observability-documentation-describes-an-ai-traffic-1b4b1b/)). This is a new fact on that broader observability story: it adds environment attribution to performance and web-traffic analysis rather than another monitoring or AI-traffic surface.

## Trend signal
This supports a broad direction toward more inspectable operational signals: teams can segment telemetry by the deployment context that produced it. But the release does not materially support a tracked agent-system pattern. It is ordinary analytics functionality rather than evidence about agent protocols, runtime boundaries, completed-work economics, or verification bandwidth. This does not yet fit a pattern New Runtime tracks.

## Why now
Vercel does not give a calendar-based rationale for the release. Its stated rationale is operational: custom-environment deployments had been folded into Preview, while teams need separate performance and traffic views for staging, QA, and canary work. The significance of the timing is therefore immediate for existing users of those environments, not a disclosed strategic deadline or migration window.

## Why it matters
Release validation depends on knowing which deployment produced a signal. When canary or staging traffic is blended into Preview, an engineer investigating a regression has to infer whether a slow page, traffic spike, or engagement change belongs to the test deployment or to unrelated preview work. Environment-level attribution gives that investigation a more precise starting point.

For teams building AI-enabled products, this can matter during controlled rollouts just as it does for conventional application changes. A new retrieval flow, model-routing rule, or generated interface can be deployed to a canary environment before wider release. Separate views do not verify that the change is safe or useful, but they help keep the observed performance and traffic attached to the rollout being reviewed.

The value is primarily lower classification friction. Because Vercel says no new data is collected and no configuration change is needed, teams can add environment-level checks to an existing workflow rather than start an instrumentation project. They should still ensure that deployment names are meaningful and that queries are scoped to the intended environment.

## Limits and uncertainty
Vercel describes the new attribution and the query surfaces, but it does not publish measured effects on performance analysis, traffic analysis, incident detection, or release outcomes. It does not say whether historical custom-environment data is retroactively reclassified, so teams should not assume that older reports will match the new environment breakdown.

The changelog also does not explain timing or propagation behavior for environment names across every interface. Although the Aggregation API is listed for Web Analytics, Vercel does not list an equivalent programmatic endpoint for Speed Insights in this announcement. The behavior has not been independently tested here across a staging, QA, and canary setup.

## Skill to build now
Define a small environment-review checklist for each rollout. Use stable custom environment names for staging, QA, and canary deployments; then compare their Speed Insights and Web Analytics views with Production before broadening a release. Query the same environment through `vc metrics` or the query builder when a dashboard trend needs investigation. The useful discipline is to treat environment identity as part of the release record, not as a label added after an incident.

## Reader takeaway
Vercel has stopped folding custom-environment analytics into Preview. For Pro and Enterprise teams already deploying to staging, QA, or canary environments, the same telemetry can now be filtered and queried under the environment that produced it. This improves rollout visibility, but it adds attribution rather than new measurements.

## Open question
Will Vercel retroactively reclassify historical custom-environment data, or will the new attribution apply only to data captured after this release?

Editor: [Andrey Reshetnikov](https://newruntime.com/owner-profile.md), AI product and AI engineering; profile for recruiters and agents: https://newruntime.com/owner-profile.json

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