The Event Stream shows Segment events from your website, mobile app, or servers as they arrive at Aetra. You can check that your implementation is working and that events fire in the format you expect. You can also debug problems without waiting for the rest of the pipeline.
Segment’s Debugger is a sampled list of 500 events, and it only starts when you open the screen. The Event Stream is not sampled. It is real time, and it keeps the last 24 hours of searchable events. That makes it a better debugger for the same job.
Which calls are reaching Aetra? When a conversion fires, what data did Aetra add before it shipped to Meta or Google? Did your last Order Completed event arrive with the email and phone number Meta needs for Advanced Matching, or did it go through with only a cookie?
A live feed of your tracking
Open any space, turn on Settings → Event Stream, and go to the Events tab. Segment events that flow through Aetra appear as they happen. A status indicator shows the live connection is up. Pause freezes the list so you can look at one event. New events keep buffering in the background, and the list catches up when you resume.
Each row is an ingestion event or an enrichment event.
An ingestion event is a track, identify, page, screen, group, or alias call from Segment, captured as it landed.
An enrichment event is the moment Aetra merged a visitor’s stored matching profile into a conversion before it shipped to your ad platforms.
The two row types are linked. You can jump from an ingestion event to every enrichment that fired for it, or from an enrichment back to its parent.
Inline diffs for enrichment
Aetra collects first-party data over time and attaches it to conversions when they fire. The Event Stream shows the original payload next to the enriched one.
Open an enrichment row for a side-by-side diff. Email, phone, name, click IDs, location, and custom traits that Aetra added are marked as additions. Fields that were already on the event stay as they were.
Open an ingestion event and switch to the Profile Changes tab to see what this call changed in that visitor’s stored profile. You can see whether an identify captured a new email, or whether a page view brought in a new Facebook Click ID. You can read those changes line by line.
That used to take a custom logging pipeline. It is now in the dashboard.
Filters
Without filters, a live feed is hard to scan. You can show ingest rows, enrich rows, or both. You can filter by event type (track, identify, page, screen, group, or alias), by user ID, anonymous ID, or event name, and by any property on the payload, including email, plan, page URL, or message ID.
Most teams will start with the property filter. Filter on an email to see one customer. Filter on a message ID to debug a broken conversion. Set a filter and watch to check that Order Completed events on the pro plan are landing.
Every filter is in the URL, so a view is a link. Send it in Slack and a teammate sees the same list.
Pause
Pause does not drop events. The list freezes, new events keep arriving in the background, and a counter shows how many are queued. They flow into the list in order when you resume.
Filters apply to the live stream, not only to history. After you set a filter, only matching events come through.
You also get the last 24 hours of history. Open the page after a campaign launch and the earlier events are already there. Older events load as you scroll.
How teams use this
If a conversion did not match, filter on the event’s message ID. The detail panel shows the original payload, the enriched payload, the diff, and what the profile contributed. If email is missing after enrichment, the profile did not have it yet. Then you look at which upstream identify should have captured it.
To see whether a campaign’s click IDs landed, filter on the click ID property and watch them come in as visitors hit your site.
To see what is sent to Meta on purchases, filter to enrichment events on Order Completed. Each row is the post-enrichment payload that left Aetra.
To check a user’s profile, filter by user ID and step through their events. The Profile Changes tab shows how their matching profile changed with each one.
Have you ever struggled to find a matching event when you were testing a Segment mapping? In the Event Stream you can search the last 24 hours and pick an event to test the mapping.
How to turn it on
The Event Stream is opt-in per space. Turn it on in Settings → Event Stream and Aetra starts recording. Turn it off and the stored 24-hour history is wiped immediately. Nothing is kept.
You do not need a code change or a new setup step. You do not add an extra destination. Your Segment workspace, destinations, and webhooks keep working. The Event Stream sits on the same pipeline you already use.
If you are an Aetra customer, the Event Stream is in your dashboard now. Open any space, turn on the switch, and watch events as they pass through Aetra.
If you are not on Aetra yet and you run paid campaigns through Segment, book a demo. We can show you the Event Stream against your own data the same day.
Founder & CEO
Engineer turned marketer with 10+ years in ad tech and marketing technology. Obsessed with closing the gap between ad spend and accurate attribution.