# How do I keep staging traffic out of production data?

Asked by Giulia Moretti on 2025-06-20. Tags: environments, workspaces, setup.

We are a fintech and our QA team runs regression suites against staging every
night. Those sessions are showing up in our production audiences and analytics,
which is skewing an experiment we care about.

What I tried so far:

1. Filtering QA IP ranges in the audience conditions. Works but fragile, and it
   does not stop the events from being recorded.
2. Pointing staging at a separate slot. Wrong tool for the job obviously.
3. Looked for an "exclude internal traffic" toggle and did not find one

What is the intended setup here? I assume there is a proper way to isolate
non-production traffic entirely.

## 1 answer

### Accepted answer from Jakob Lindqvist (2025-06-20)

The intended setup is environments. Croct supports multiple environments per
workspace, typically dev and prod, and each environment has its own
application ID. Point staging at the dev application ID and its traffic
lands in a completely separate bucket: separate profiles, separate events,
separate analytics. Your production audiences never see it.

If you use the CLI, this is exactly what `croct.json5` is for. The config
maps applications per environment, so the right application ID gets used
depending on where the code runs. No conditionals in your own code.

For the automated test suites specifically there is an even stricter option:
set `NEXT_PUBLIC_CROCT_TEST` and the SDK uses a mock event transport, so the
tests send no events at all. That is what we do for CI, dev environment for
humans poking at staging, test mode for the machines.

Your IP-filter approach was fighting the symptom; with the environment split
the data never mixes in the first place.

#### Reply from Giulia Moretti (2025-06-21)

Set up the dev environment yesterday and enabled the test flag in CI.
Overnight run came through clean, nothing in production analytics.
Exactly what I was looking for, thanks.