Importing events

In the main Event Debugger view, the Event Timeline down the side allows you to import events from other devices that you can view as if the were generated by your own browser. The options are available via the ‘Import’ button, and detailed below.

Importing from HAR files

HAR files are JSON representations of HTTP sessions. They include a list of requests and responses made to servers by a single client, including all the metadata such as headers. You can export the current contents of the ‘Network’ panel in your DevTools to a HAR file, and then later load them into the extension as a record that events were triggered and successfully validated (or not). This can be useful for troubleshooting, or as a record of the QA process.

Aside from the browser, other tools like Charles Proxy or Fiddler, commonly used as proxies for verifying analytics from mobile applications, can also export to this format.

Importing failed events

Historical events that have already failed the enrichment process can be imported into the extension to allow you to easily find the errors with the events.

The extension will accept an uncompressed file, which you can paste a selection from, or in total straight from your clipboard.

Importing events from ElasticSearch / OpenSearch

If you use ElasticSearch / OpenSearch as a destination for your events (or as used in Snowplow Mini) you can specify a query to use and the extension will load events as they are indexed.

This can be useful for testing many devices at once, e.g. multiple mobile devices that are all sending events to your Snowplow Mini instance.

Importing events from an ngrok tunnel

ngrok is a service for creating ad-hoc network endpoints that can accept / tunnel requests and offers an API for other services to introspect and act on the requests that were received. Using ngrok, you can create an endpoint, use that endpoint as a Collector destination for your tracking, and then examine any events sent to it via the extension.

When you attempt to import from ngrok, the extension will attempt to connect to the ngrok tool running on your local machine on port 4040 (localhost:4040) to access the ngrok Agent API. If successful, any Snowplow events sent to the corresponding tunnel endpoint will appear in the extension.

Remote debugging with Chrome DevTools

Applications using the Chrome DevTools Protocol can be inspected remotely. This includes some mobile browsers, some mobile applications, WebViews on Android, Chromium Embedded Framework applications, and more. You may need to access the remote DevTools via the URL chrome://inspect/#devices in order to access DevTools while maintaining your installed extensions. Network requests made on the remote device should appear in the extension as usual.