User Activity is the centralized location to dive deeper into individual users within your Amplitude product. You can easily switch between different projects, search for specific/generic lists, and monitor individual event streams.
Under the User Activity title, you can adjust which of your projects' users you would like to examine at a more granular level. Make sure you are always searching in the correct project.
What you will learn in this article
This article is a guide to using the User Look-Up feature, detailing which search criteria can be used, what data can be found: event stream and user profile, and how the event time is calculated.
Prerequisites
- The top user details section will always display the most recent user properties for that user
- Group properties are only visible in the raw event view
Table of Contents
Search
Our robust search functionality lets you find a specific item (e.g. a User ID or name) or generates a list of users (e.g. a list of users in London). You can search for a user by one or multiple user property values. Below are the types of searches you can perform in User Activity.
Search by User ID, Device ID, and Amplitude ID
Tip: you can search any User Property using the syntax: email=bob@xyz.com
Search by User Properties
The Advanced Controls bar will allow you to filter for users who 1) match specified user property value(s) in the dropdown and 2) performed at least one active event in the last 6 months. Search is across ALL historical user property values your users had sometime in the last 6 months.
Search by string contains is also available. If you would like to search for users who have a user property value containing a specific string, then you must:
- Prefix your custom user property type with
gp:. - Include a
~between your user property type and user property value. - Example:
gp:email~amplitude.
If you search for more than one string contains condition at a time, then the filter will search for users who meet ALL of your specified conditions. An AND operator is assumed.
Real-Time Activity
The Real-Time Activity section below the search bar is a real-time feed of the most recent 100 events from the last day sent to Amplitude (based on upload time) with their corresponding time, ID, event, platform, and country. In addition, you can use the "Show" dropdown to apply filters onto the Event Stream so you only see your event(s) of interest. To see a live stream of all the events coming into Amplitude, click the "Live" toggle in the top right corner so that it appears green.
User Profile
Once you search for a user, the top section will display information pertinent to this user. You can also click into an individual user by clicking on their ID to pull up their user details and individual user event stream. The top user details section will always display the most recent user properties for that user. The first five rows show user properties Amplitude will track by default if you are sending data client-side as well as other usage metrics that are calculated for each user.
All other user properties at the bottom of this section will be custom user properties that you have chosen to track for your users in this project. For example, in the AmpliTunes project, we are tracking an additional ten custom user properties that include information such as 'Communities_Joined'.
Individual Event Stream
The Event Stream section below holds the entire event history of a user and will show all of the events for a given day. You can easily adjust the day with the date picker using the calendar icon in the top right-hand corner. Above the date picker is the "Live event updates" toggle which will activate a live stream of all the events coming into Amplitude right now.
The Event Stream is grouped by session and ordered by your session property with the most recent activity at the top of the list. Every (blue) event in a session is connected by a line; all (green) events that are out of sessions stand alone. You can customize the events you want to see in the Event Stream by choosing to show All Events, highlight specific event(s), or only show specific event(s). Additionally, you can filter on a particular Device ID.
If you choose to highlight multiple events, they will be denoted as A, B, C, etc. next to the event name in the Event Stream. You can use the arrows or "steppers" in the top right of the event stream to jump to the next result of the highlighted event. For example, if you want to highlight the 'SearchSong' and 'RemoveFromList' events, the steppers will jump to the next match for either of those events in this user's event stream.
Clicking on an event will give you detailed information about it, including all of the event and user properties associated with the event. The "Info" view gives a digestible view of the raw data call that was sent with the event.
You can switch between the "Info" and "Raw" data view in the top right-hand corner of the event details panel. The "Raw" view will display the raw JSON file that Amplitude received with that event. This view is useful for debugging the data you send to Amplitude.
You can link to a specific event in a user's event stream by clicking the "Get Link" button and then copying the corresponding URL. This is very useful for sharing possible bugs in instrumentation:
Finally, you can expand the view of the event by clicking the expand icon in the top right corner of the event details box:
The Event Stream is a powerful tool that can be utilized to troubleshoot or debug issues and can provide assurance that new features are being tracked correctly.
Raw Data Fields
Event Time
We use different timestamps to ensure that your data is being reported accurately.
- client_event_time: Local timestamp (UTC) of when the device logged the event.
- client_upload_time: Local timestamp (UTC) of when the device uploaded the event.
- server_received_time: Amplitude timestamp (UTC) of when our servers receive the event.
- server_upload_time: Amplitude timestamp (UTC) of when the event is ingested into our ingestion system. This timestamp is not used to calculate event_time, but it is available to reference in the raw data.
- event_time: Amplitude timestamp (UTC) which is the client_event_time adjusted by the difference between server_received_time and client_upload_time, specifically:
event_time = client_event_time + (server_received_time - client_upload_time).
Daily exported files are based on server_upload_time and all dashboards are based on event_time. We recommend that queries on raw data use event_time.
UUID
UUID is a unique identifier for an event. It is for internal usage at Amplitude. You do not have to worry about using it.
Video Walkthrough