When a destination stops accepting events, you want three things fast: did the event reach us, did we try to forward it, and what did the destination say back?
The event log
Events → Inspector shows every ingested event. For each event, the Fan-out tab lists every destination that was supposed to receive it, along with the final status:
- Delivered — 2xx from the destination
- Retrying — non-2xx, still in the retry schedule
- DLQ — exhausted retries, moved to dead-letter queue
- Skipped (consent) — destination not permitted for this visitor’s consent state
- Skipped (filter) — destination’s event filter excluded this event type
Each row expands to show the exact request (URL, headers, body) and response (status, body, latency). This is the single most useful view when something breaks.
Retry schedule
Default per-destination retries: 12 attempts with exponential backoff over ~24 hours. The schedule is:
30s, 1m, 2m, 5m, 15m, 30m, 1h, 2h, 4h, 8h, 12h, 24h
After the last attempt, the event moves to the destination’s DLQ.
Dead-letter queue (DLQ)
Destinations → [destination] → DLQ lists events that failed all retries. Each row shows the final error. From here you can:
- Replay individual events — useful when the destination was briefly down and you want to catch up.
- Bulk replay the DLQ — moves everything back into the retry pipeline.
- Archive — removes from DLQ without replay (for events you’ve given up on).
Common failure modes
- 401 / 403 — token rotated or revoked. Update the token in the destination config; new events flow immediately; DLQ can be replayed.
- 400 with “missing required field” — event shape doesn’t match destination’s requirements. Check field mapping and source event.
- 429 (rate limited) — destination is throttling. Retries back off automatically; usually self-resolves.
- 5xx — destination is down. Retries continue. Check the destination’s status page.
Partial outages
If only one destination is failing, the others continue. eventabee’s fan-out is per-destination independent; Meta being down doesn’t block Google.