Troubleshooting and FAQs

My transformation or destination isn't working, what do I do?

1. Checking that the transformation or destination is enabled with the correct configuration options in the data pipeline tab. You can find the correct configuration options in the transformation or destination's documentation by searching for it in the destinations, transformations, or filtering sections of the docs.

2. Click "Logs & metrics" and go to the Metrics tab to check that the transformation or destination is processing events without errors.

3. Check the Logs tab to see if there are any errors.

4. Go to the data management tab to check if there any ingestion warnings.

5. If the transformation or destination relates to an external service, check that the external service is working correctly. Make a request to the relevant API endpoint. You can also use a tool like webhook.site to check that PostHog sends events as expected.

How do I capture data from another application?

We deprecated the functionality of data pipelines that enable you to capture data from other tools on a schedule. Functionally, these were a cron which ran every minute (or more) and pulled data from another tool.

There are two options for recreating this functionality:

1. Set up a cron of your own. You can use a tool like val.town to easily set up scheduled tasks that capture data from other tools and send them to PostHog. Our tutorials on capturing new RSS items, events from Calendly webhooks, and GitHub stars are examples of this.

2. Use our data warehouse. PostHog's data warehouse enables you to import and use data from platforms like Stripe, Hubspot, and Postgres natively in PostHog. See our docs for more information.

How do I track when users do an event for the first time?

There are a few ways to capture a user doing an event for the first time. We cover a few of these in our tutorials on tracking new and returning users and first touch attribution.

• Create a cohort matching users who have done an event for the first time recently.
• Use a custom event to set a person or event property. For example, you can set a first_seen property with the $set_once option.
• Use HogQL to query for the min(timestamp) of an event.

How do I migrate events or rows into PostHog?

See our migration docs for the full details.

How do I do real time exports?

We don't currently support real time exports.

If you need more than the hourly interval batch exports and are on the enterprise plan, please contact our team (or email sales@posthog.com).

If you're not on the enterprise plan, check out our webhook issue on GitHub.

Where are my missing events?

See our troubleshooting guide for events not appearing in a project.

Why can't I use the UI or events API to export data?

You can, but they are rate-limited. Batch exports should be your default. The table below compares the options:

If that isn't clear enough, here's a decision tree you might find useful:

graph TD
    A[Do you need to export more than 3,500 events?] --> |Yes| B[Use batch exports]
    A --> |No| C[Do you need to run regular exports e.g. once a day or once a week?]
    C --> |Yes| B
    C --> |No| E[Use the PostHog UI or the Events API]

Why am I seeing duplicate events?

We recommend sending a uuid value with every captured event. Events with the same UUID, event name, timestamp, and distinct_id are considered duplicates and are eventually de-duplicated.

This is important because failures and retries happen, so your application or our library might send the same event multiple times. If you don't send UUIDs for every event, we aren't able to know if it's the same event, and hence we are not able to de-duplicate it for you.

Some of our SDKs, such as JavaScript Web, do this automatically, other SDKs allow you to pass UUIDs. If you're using an SDK which doesn't currently support UUIDs for every event, please consider creating a PR or filing an issue in GitHub.