Live Events

RudderStack’s Live Events feature gives you a real-time view of the events flowing from your sources to the connected destinations. You can use this feature for better observability into your events and debug errors in case of any event failures at the destination level.

You can use this utility to view the following three types of events:

Source live events

This feature provides you with the real-time visibility into the source events collected by RudderStack — it is helpful when you want to verify if your source is correctly configured.

View source live events

1. Go to the source for which you want to view the live events.
2. Click the Live events button.

3. Once you send the event data from the source to RudderStack, you will see the following details in this view:

   • Name of the event
   • Type of the event collected from the source
   • Date and Time of the collected event
   • The Payload panel containing the event payload
   • The Tracking Plan Validation panel on the bottom right, just below the Payload panel.

Note that:

• It can take a couple of seconds before your events start showing up in this view.
• You can view live events sent up to the past 15 minutes.

RudderStack supports real-time tracking plan validation at the source level — this means RudderStack validates the events against the tracking plan rules as they are being sent from the source.

Destination live events

The destination live events view gives you real-time visibility into your destination’s responses.

When routing events to a destination, there can be instances when the events do not show up in the destination — in such cases, the error message included in this view is helpful for debugging.

View destination live events

You can view live events for cloud mode destinations only .

1. Go to the destination for which you want to view the live events.

2. Click the Live events button.

3. Once you send the events from your source to the destination, you will see the following details in this view:

   • Name of the event
   • Type of the event
   • Date and Time of the event
   • Error message of the event in case of event failure — it gives specific details related to an error including the error response and the date and time of the attempt made to send the event.
   • The Payload panel containing the event payload sent to the destination.

Note that:

• Live events are shown for all destinations. However, the event payload is not shown for some destination types like the object storage platforms and data warehouses.
• It can take a couple of seconds before your events start showing up in this view.
• You can view live events sent up to the past 15 minutes.
• You can use this view to filter events by source if your destination is connected to multiple sources.

Use case

Suppose that you send some events to Facebook Custom Audience but they are not delivered. On checking the Live Events tab for the Facebook Custom Audience destination, you see the following error:

Clicking on See full error option displays the following error response:

Facebok Custom Audience supports only record type of events. As seen above, an identify event is sent instead and hence you see the error.

RudderStack tries sending this event several times before marking it as aborted.

Transformations live events

You can also view the live events in case a transformation is connected to a destination. RudderStack lets you view the events before and after a transformation is applied:

RudderStack also notifies you about any dropped events or errors during the transformation along with the details:

Note that:

• It can take a couple of seconds before your events start showing up in this view.
• You can view live events sent up to the past 15 minutes.

FAQ

Why are the events sent to the destination failing?

Routing events to a destination can fail for various reasons. Often, it is due to the incorrect configuration of a destination in the RudderStack dashboard. Some other possible reasons are:

• Incorrect/bad event payload structure
• Rate-limiting by the destination
• Network error
• Destination downtime

The Destination Live Events feature gives you better visibility into how your events are sent to the destination. If there are any delivery failures, the utility also gives you insights into the reasons for the failure.

Are live events supported for device mode destinations?

RudderStack does not support the live events functionality for device mode destinations, that is, destinations configured to receive events in device mode.

You can view live events for cloud mode destinations only.

Questions? Contact us by email or on Slack