Look up event data for individual users – Amplitude

This article will help you:

Search for event data tied to specific users of your product
View and chart a user's event stream
Troubleshoot your Amplitude instrumentation

Amplitude's User Look-Up gives you a centralized and intuitive way to dive deeper into data generated by individual users and accounts within your product. You can easily switch between different projects and portfolios, search for specific or generic lists, and monitor individual event streams.

Before you begin

The section below the search bar in User Look-Up is a real-time feed of the most recent 100 events Amplitude has received from your product during the last day (based on upload time), along with their corresponding time, ID, event, platform, and country. To see a live stream of all events coming into Amplitude, set the Live event updates toggle in the top right corner to On.

NOTE: Identify events are not visible in user lookup.

Although not discussed in this article, the Users & Sessions tab also provides access to:

Accounts: Search for accounts to review their specific properties and event paths.
Session Replay: Search for a user to review their session activity.

Search for specific users

This feature 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.

To search for a specific user, follow these steps:

Go to Users & Sessions, and click on User Look-Up.
Click the Search users field. The Search Users fly-out panel appears.
Enter the user ID, device ID, or Amplitude ID in the search box, or click Advanced to search by user property values. You can also search on any user property directly, using the [property] = [value] syntax. For example: email=bob@xyz.com

Searching by user property values will display a list of users who match the criteria you specified, and who triggered at least one active event in the last six months.

If you would like to search for users who have a user property value containing a specific string, click in the Search users field (in the Search Users fly-out panel shown above) and type in your custom user property type, prefixed with gp: . Be sure to include a ~ between your user property type and user property value. For example: gp:email~amplitude.

If desired, filter your search further by a specific event in the Filter By Events dropdown.

View a user's details and event stream

When you find the user you're looking for, click their ID to view their user profile. The profile is split into two sections: the user details section—where the user's most-recent properties will be visible—and the event stream section, which contains the user's entire event history and displays all events received from them for a given day, which you can specify using the date picker.

The first five rows of the user details section show user properties Amplitude will track by default if your product sends data client-side, as well as other usage metrics calculated for each user.

NOTE: Values for the Total Spent and # Purchases metrics are aggregated based on events in the user's stream that contain the $revenue property.

Any user properties at the bottom of this section are custom user properties you're tracking for your users in this project or portfolio.

You can activate a live stream of all events as they are ingested into Amplitude by setting the Live event updates toggle to On.

Amplitude groups the event stream by session, and orders it in reverse chronological order—i.e., the session property with the most recent activity is at the top of the list. Blue events in a session are all connected by a line; green, out-of-session events stand alone. You can customize the events you want to see in the event stream by choosing to show all events, highlight specific events, or only show specific events. Additionally, you can filter on a particular device ID.

There are two available views: the Info view, which gives a digestible view of the event data, and the Raw view, which displays the raw JSON file Amplitude received, along with any user properties that persisted from previous events or Identify requests. This is useful for debugging the data your product sends to Amplitude.

NOTE: Group properties are only visible in the raw event view.

You can link to a specific event in a user's event stream by clicking Get Link and copying the corresponding URL. This is useful for sharing potential bugs in instrumentation.

Chart a user's event stream

You can choose up to ten events from a user's event stream to view in a funnel or segmentation chart. Follow these steps from the user's event stream in User Look-Up:

Check the boxes next to the events you'd like to visualize in a chart.
Click Create Chart and choose Segmentation or Funnel to visualize the user's event stream data.

Raw data fields

Amplitude uses different timestamps to ensure your data is being reported accurately:

client_event_time: Local timestamp (UTC) when the device logged the event.
client_upload_time: Local timestamp (UTC) when the device uploaded the event.
server_received_time: Amplitude timestamp (UTC) when Amplitude's servers receive the event.
server_upload_time: Amplitude timestamp (UTC) when the event is ingested into Amplitude's 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)

NOTE: If the difference between server_received_time and client_upload_time is less than 60 seconds, the event_time will not be adjusted and will equal the client_event_time. This is done automatically for newer projects, i.e, those with an ID of 243704 or higher. If you want this 60-second cutoff time to apply to an older project, please reach out to Amplitude Support.

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 event identifier intended for internal usage at Amplitude only.

Portfolios

User event streams are supported in both projects and portfolios. To find a user stream in a portfolio, navigate to the Users & Sessions tab and select the portfolio from the dropdown.

NOTE: Only portfolios consisting of five or fewer projects are supported.

User properties can only be viewed at a project (not portfolio) level. This is because properties may be different for the same user in different projects.