Debug Destination Live Events

When routing events to a destination via RudderStack, there may be times when the events do not show up in your destination. This guide walks you through the steps to debug this issue using RudderStack’s Live Events feature.

To view and debug your destination live events, your destination must be configured to send events in cloud mode.

Why are events sent to the destination failing?

Routing events to a destination via RudderStack can fail for various reasons, including:

• Incorrect destination configuration
• Bad event structure, that is, event is not in a destination-specific format
• Rate limiting enforced by the destination
• Destination downtime

You can use RudderStack’s Live Events feature to view the events sent to your destination in near real-time, and debug any delivery failure.

View destination live events

1. Set up your destination in RudderStack.
2. Click the Live Events button to view the events sent from your source:

The resulting window highlights the following information:

• Name of the event.
• Error message of the event in case of any event failure. Upon clicking See full error, you get the specific details like the error response and the time of the first attempt made to send the event.

3. Click the event to view the event payload sent to the destination.

Important considerations

• A live session stays active for about 15 minutes after you open it.
• New events appear on a short polling cadence (typically every few seconds), so updates are not instant.
• Only a fixed set of events is visible at a time — the viewer does not auto-scroll. Click the Clear Events button to load the next set of incoming events.
• Live events are shown for all RudderStack destinations except the object storage destinations like:
  • Amazon S3
  • Google Cloud Storage
  • Microsoft Azure Blob Storage

Use case

Suppose that you send some events to the Facebook Custom Audience destination but they are not delivered.

Upon checking the Live Events tab for the Facebook Custom Audience destination, you observe the following error:

On clicking the See full error option, you can see the following error response:

From the error response, it is clear that an identify event was sent to the destination. According to the Facebook Custom Audience documentation, only track events are supported. As a result, when RudderStack tries sending the identify event, the destination gives an error. RudderStack retries sending this event several times before marking it as aborted.

This way, you can use the Live Events feature to better understand the responses received from the destination in case of any delivery failures and resolve them faster.