Objective
You can learn how to access historical event data for a specific Segment source when the real-time Debugger is insufficient. This is particularly useful for identifying and reviewing infrequent or rare events that occurred in the past.
Product
Segment
Procedure
The Source Debugger is a real-time tool that displays a maximum of 500 events as they arrive. To view historical data or payloads for infrequent events, use one of the following methods:
Connect a Storage Destination (Recommended)
For a complete record of all historical event data, connect a storage destination to your Segment source.
Navigate to your Segment workspace.
Add a destination such as a Data Warehouse (e.g., Snowflake, BigQuery), Amazon S3, or Google Cloud Storage.
Once connected, you can query these destinations by event name and timestamp to retrieve full payloads for any event ever sent to that source.
Note: Segment loads up to two months of your historical data when you connect a warehouse. For full historical backfills you'll need to be a Segment Business plan customer. If you'd like to learn more about our Business plan and all the features that come with it, check out Segment's pricing page.
Use Delivery Overview for Failed Events
If you are looking for payloads of events that failed to reach a specific destination:
Navigate to the Destinations tab and select the desired destination.
Click on Delivery Overview.
You can view up to 10 sample payloads per error type over a rolling two-week range.
Note: Delivery Overview is only available for cloud-mode destinations.
Check the Source Schema
To verify if an event has been seen and when it last occurred:
Navigate to your Source.
Click on the Schema tab.
This will show a list of event names and their "LAST SEEN" timestamps, though it does not provide the event payload.
Event Tester "Load from Source"
Navigate to Destination > Event Tester.
Use the Load event from source feature.
Note that this only surfaces a very small subset of the most recent events and may not capture rare events if they occurred outside the recent window.
Note: Event Tester is only available for cloud-mode destinations.
Additional Information