Manage user events

This page describes how to view user event information and purge user events.

To record user events as they happen, see Record real-time user events. To import user event data from past events, see Import historical user events.

View aggregated user event information

You can see information about recorded user events for your app in the Google Cloud console on the Events tab of your app's Data page.

This page shows information such as number of events ingested, number of unjoined events, percentage change in number of events over a period, and average count of event type per document. In addition, you can see metrics for each event type over time. Metrics appear about 24 hours after you first upload events to Recommendations for Media.

To see your user event information:

  1. In the Google Cloud console, go to the Agent Builder page.

    Agent Builder

  2. Click the name of the app that you want to see user event information for.

  3. On the Data page, go to the Events tab. User event information is displayed on this tab.

Purge user events

If you have user events that were not recorded correctly and need to remove them, you can do so using the userEvents.purge API method.

Specify the events you want to remove by using a user event filter. You can use the user event filter to specify the events that you want to purge. You can filter with the eventTime, eventType, visitorID, and userID fields.

Because you cannot undo the purge, test your filters by conducting a dry run before deleting user events. The force field is set to false by default; this setting will return the number of events to be deleted without actually deleting them. When you are ready to actually delete the user events, set the force field to true.

This example filters for a time range, which must use the Zulu Time date format. The force field is set to false.

curl -X POST \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer "$(gcloud auth application-default print-access-token)"" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8" \
  --data '{
    "filter":"eventTime > \"2023-12-21T18:25:43.511Z\" eventTime < \"2023-12-21T18:30:43.511Z\"",
    "force":"false"
  }' \
  "https://discoveryengine.googleapis.com/v1/projects/PROJECT_NUMBER/locations/global/dataStores/DATA_STORE_ID/userEvents:purge"

You should receive a response object similar to the following, where purge-user-events-54321 is the operation ID:

{
  "name": "projects/PROJECT_NUMBER/locations/global/catalogs/default_catalog/operations/purge-user-events-54321"
}

This example requests the operation status:

curl -H "Authorization: Bearer $(gcloud auth application-default print-access-token)" \
"https://discoveryengine.googleapis.com/v1/projects/PROJECT_NUMBER/locations/global/dataStores/DATA_STORE_ID/operations/OPERATION_ID"

Operation status example: 

{
  "name": "projects/PROJECT_NUMBER/locations/global/catalogs/default_catalog/operations/OPERATION_ID",
  "done": true,
  "response": {
    "@type": "type.googleapis.com/google.cloud.discoveryengine.v1.PurgeUserEventsResponse"
    "purgedEventsCount": "1"
  }
}

Setting the force field to true forces the delete to occur.

curl -X POST \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer "$(gcloud auth application-default print-access-token)"" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8" \
  --data '{
    "filter":"eventTime > \"2023-12-21T18:25:43.511Z\" eventTime < \"2023-12-21T18:30:43.511Z\"",
    "force":"true"
  }' \
"https://discoveryengine.googleapis.com/v1/projects/PROJECT_NUMBER/locations/global/dataStores/DATA_STORE_ID/userEvents:purge"

Use the user event filter

You can filter user events to be deleted.

The filter is a string that contains one or more of the following restrictions:

  • eventTime: Provides a timestamp to bound the events to be deleted. This filter can be specified once or twice, with a greater-than (>) or less-than (<) symbol. The bounded time must be a single contiguous block.

  • eventType: Restrict the events to be deleted to a single event type.

  • visitorID: Restrict the events to be deleted to a single visitor ID.

  • userID: Restrict the events to be deleted to a single user ID.

Only user events that satisfy all of the restrictions are deleted.

For example, to delete all user events of type add-to-cart that were logged on or after February 1, 2023, you would provide the following filter string:

eventTime > "2023-02-01T00:00:00Z" eventType = add-to-cart

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