3

My team has recently migrated from Parse to Facebook Analytics. We know that Facebook events are removed after 30 days so we are planning on exporting them and then storing them in our own Parse Server.

We are having problems when we are trying to export the analytics from Facebook. The problem is that every time we get the export from Facebook the file is empty. There is definitely events being logged as our product is live and we can see events occurring in the Facebook dashboard.

The exports are going to be in a cron job that is run every 2 hours and retrieves the events for the last 2 hours.

Generate request:

GENERATE_URL="https://graph.facebook.com/v2.6/"$APP_ID"/analytics_app_events_exports"
curl -sS --request POST $GENERATE_URL -F access_token=$ACCESS_TOKEN -F start_ts=$START_TS -F end_ts=$END_TS

Query request:

QUERY_URL="https://graph.facebook.com/v2.6/"$ID"?access_token="$ACCESS_TOKEN
curl -sS $QUERY_URL

Query response:

{
    "start_ts": "2016-05-25T02:30:21+0000",
    "end_ts": "2016-05-25T04:30:21+0000",
    "status": "COMPLETED"
    ...
}

Download request:

DOWNLOAD_URL="https://lookaside.fbsbx.com/analytics/app_events_export/download?access_token="$ACCESS_TOKEN"&id="$ID"&filename="$FILENAME
curl -sS $DOWNLOAD_URL

Reference to FB docs: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/analytics/export

We would appreciate any suggestion on what is going wrong.

ConfusedNoob
  • 9,826
  • 14
  • 64
  • 85
MShipman
  • 351
  • 4
  • 8

2 Answers2

1

The export API won't return any data for the current day. For example, the data for Monday will not be available until 12:00am Tuesday (UTC-8).

You may want to try making $START_TS and $END_TS one day earlier. This way, your cron job will run every 2 hours and retrieve the events for 2 hours the previous day (e.g., get all events for Monday 2:00-4:00pm on Tuesday at 4:00pm.)

Chris Barker
  • 2,279
  • 14
  • 15
0

Turns out the issue wasn't coming from our code but it was Facebook. If using Facebook Analytics be aware that the export jobs tend to randomly start failing every few months. Best thing to do is to look through the list of Facebook bugs and see if you can see something relevant to your issue.

MShipman
  • 351
  • 4
  • 8