Pendo uses various methods to process data based on its source and triggers. Each method has a distinct processing period before data becomes visible in analytics and usable in segments. Whether for new Features, Track Events, guide targeting, or API calls, each undergoes processing at varying rates. Pendo Admins can view real-time raw events in the Raw Events tab within an app's settings to review and verify event data as it's collected.
To understand data processing fully, it can help to familiarize yourself with the events collected by Pendo. Pendo captures all user behavior after the install script is installed and initialized in your app. Your visitors' product usage is stored as raw events, which includes the code and metadata necessary to tag the event. This is how most data is transmitted to Pendo. It's also possible to send data directly to Pendo with the API, such as server-side Track Events or metadata updates. All of these events are categorized and stored in a database for your subscription. Data processing refers to Pendo looking through these events, matching tagging rules to usage events or mapping API events, and making those events visible in the UI.
General processing time
Data is updated hourly in the Pendo UI, with bulk calculations performed at the start of each hour. Processing typically completes within 15 minutes, depending on internet traffic. For example, events collected between 2pm and 3pm would appear in the Pendo UI by 3:15pm that same day.
An exception to this timing occurs with segment calculations for guide targeting (for example, show guide if visitor used a specific Feature), which can take up to 5 minutes to determine if a guide should appear.
Page and Feature tags
Data for Page and Feature tags processes in reverse chronological order, starting with today's events and going backward in time.
Tagging a new Page or Feature immediately begins processing event data, starting with today's events and progressing in reverse chronological order. Editing an existing tag clears the previous tagged events and reprocesses the tag using the new tagging rule. In some cases, you can add additional tagging rules to an existxing tag. In these situations, the previous tagged events are cleared from the UI, and all tagging rules are processed at the same time as if it were a new tag.
Visibility
When a tag is processing and no event data is visible, the tag indicates that processing is in progress on the list view for Pages or Features, on the details page for that tag, and in the Visual Design Studio.
Data becomes visible in Pendo and usable in segments as soon as the previous 90 days are processed. This typically takes less than one hour to process unless your subscription collects a large volume of events.
After the first 90-day period is processed, data becomes visible as each preceding day processes. A banner at the top of the tagged Page or Feature details page indicates the oldest date with visible data. The banner is present, and older data becomes visible continuously until all events are processed.
Processing all historical data typically takes one hour to complete, but can take as long as four hours for large subscriptions with many events. Very active subscriptions with several years of high event volume might take longer. Allow up to 24 hours for processing to finish before contacting Pendo Support. Reports, widgets, and segments that use data that precedes the oldest processed day are incomplete until data processing catches up with their selected date range.
Current product usage
Pendo continuously collects events as visitors load Pages, interact with Features in your product, and generate Track Events. These events are processed in bulk every hour at the top of the hour. It can take as long as 15 minutes for new usage data to appear in Pendo. This only impacts reports and segments where the date range includes "today".
Processing data used for guide-targeting segments
Certain data is eligible for use in segments that activate guides. In some cases, this data is time-sensitive. For example, you can use "page viewed ever" in a segment rule to deploy a guide to a visitor when they visit a page for the first time or in combination with other usage triggers. For the best user experience, the guide should deploy when the visitor becomes eligible. After Pendo processes data for the guide-targeting segment, the visitor must refresh the page or programmatically load guides (call pendo.loadGuides()) for the guide to display.
A separate processing fast-track makes this tagged usage data available for guide eligibility calculations before it's visible in Pendo analytics. This faster processing takes less than 5 seconds.
If you change rules in a guide-targeting segment, it takes up to 15 seconds for the guide to appear for the updated segment.
If you tag a new Page or Feature and use it in a guide-targeting segment, the tag must process before it's used by the guide eligibility calculation. This sequence of processing events is highly variable. You shouldn't expect your guide-targeting segment to behave as expected until the Page or Feature tag finishes processing.
For more information, see Ineligible segments for guide targeting in our Segments article.
POST to the Pendo API
Subscriptions with access to the Pendo API can send some data directly to Pendo. For example, a POST to the metadata endpoint can add or update metadata for an existing visitor or account at any time. Data sent to Pendo using the API is visible almost immediately, as soon as it's completed the necessary processing to appear in the UI.