Event Verification

Event Verification helps you understand how Freshpaint is processing your events.

The goal for Event Verification is to make Freshpaint's data processing as transparent as possible users. With Event Verification, you can verify your events are being processed the way you expect.

Event Verification Overview

When navigating to Event Verification, you will be brought to the Event Verification Overview. The Event Verification Overview let's you filter for a specific destination and event. You can then see how Freshpaint processed that event before sending it to your destination. A specific record of how Freshpaint processed an event is referred to as a "trace".

The Event Verification Summary offers several filters to help you find traces you care about.

First, you must select a Destination you want to investigate via the dropdown at the top of the tool.

We have 5 types of filters to help you identify the events you care about:

1. Time filter: This allows you to select events in a particular time frame.

2. "Show Only Me" filter: Selecting this toggle switch filters the events down to show only events that are generated from your current IP address - events that you've created. This can be particularly useful if you want to send some test events and see how they are being processed. NOTE: this filter only selects events from your current IP address, so if you generate events on your home network, then move to work at a cafe (for example), your IP address will change and we won't find events generated from your home network while you're at the cafe.

3. Event Definition filter: This dropdown allows you to zoom into a particular Event definition to see only events that match the definition you've selected.

4. Status filter: This dropdown allows you to find events with a particular terminal status (e.g. OK, Errors, Warnings, etc). This can be useful if you're looking to see which events failed to be delivered, or warnings associated with your events.

5. Search Trace Contents filter: This filter (in the bottom right of the tool) allows you to search the traces we have saved based on the contents of the trace. For example, if you know a particular piece of text you expect to show up in a trace, you can use the search bar to find Traces that contain that snippet.

If we find any traces matching your search criteria, you'll see the Event Verification Overview populate with trace entries.

An example of the Event Verification Overview, if it finds traces that match the current filters.

Trace Details

From the Trace Summary view, you can access the Trace Details view by clicking the "VIEW" button in the rightmost column.

The Trace Detail view is divided into 2 parts - the Trace Header, and the Trace Steps.

An example of the Trace Details viewer.

Trace Header

The Header shows a summary of what happened on the event, including the type of event ($web_event below), the event definition if we could find an associated event definition (Testevent below), a status chip explaining the terminal status of the event (OK), and a timestamp representing when we started processing the event.

The trace header - showing a summary of relevant details about the event.

Trace Steps

The Trace Steps tell the story of how we processed your event. The drawer on the left shows the key steps in the Freshpaint event processing model, and the right pane shows a zoomed-in look at the details of how we processed the event.

In the image above, we took seven steps while processing this event. The fifth step, Allow List is currently in view, and you can see the event and data exactly as Freshpaint saw it as we filtered out data that was unsafe for HIPAA reasons.

Sampling

Because of the volume of traffic we handle, we record traces for only a fraction of events that are sent through Freshpaint. We use sampling to do this; we record traces for only 10% of the events under normal circumstances.

Disabling Sampling

Customers may briefly disable sampling, thereby recording traces for all events, while debugging a problem they're looking into. To do this, you can use the Remove Sampling button. This works by disabling sampling for events that come from your IP address, so that events you generate from your computer will not be sampled. You'll then be able to inspect traces for everything.