Are you having trouble locating a session within Fullstory? This article identifies the most common reasons why.
Reason #1: Your data capture settings prevent capture.
Go to Settings > Data Capture and Privacy > Data Capture to see if you have any settings that would help explain why the session was never captured. From there, ask yourself the following questions:
- Is data capture toggled on?
- Are you capturing the domain this user visited?
- Are you capturing sessions from this geographical region?
- Are you blocking this user's IP address or user agent?
Reason #2: The session falls outside your plan's session replay retention period.
Double-check your plan's session replay retention under Settings > Account Management > Subscription within your Fullstory account when searching for older sessions.
If your Session replay retention is set to 1 month, but you are trying to locate a session captured 6 months ago, this would explain why you cannot see this session. Once the Session replay retention period has passed, these sessions are permanently deleted and non-recoverable.
Reason #3: Your account exceeded its monthly session limit during that time frame.
Another possibility is that your Fullstory account exceeded its monthly session limit when this user accessed your website or mobile app. When you exceed your monthly session limit, data capture will be paused until the next billing cycle, and all Admins on the account will be notified via email.
To troubleshoot, try searching for all sessions captured in Fullstory on that date. If sessions were captured consistently on that date, you can rule this possibility out.
Reason #4: Fullstory isn't capturing on that page/screen.
Still no luck? As a next step, confirm that Fullstory is correctly deployed on the page/screen. A quick way to do this is to search for other sessions within Fullstory where users visited that specific URL during that time.
If you can't confirm this within Fullstory, follow the steps outlined in this help article to verify whether Fullstory is correctly deployed on the page/screen.
Reason #5: This user has installed a third-party extension or uses strict browser settings that block data capture.
If Fullstory has never captured any sessions for a specific user or if you're able to view some older sessions but no recent ones, it's always possible that this user has either installed a third-party extension (such as Ghostery or uBlock) or has strict browser settings in place which can block data capture. The best way to confirm this would be to contact the user directly.
Noticing a good chunk of your users are using a third-party extension to block data capture? You might want to check out setting up Custom Endpoints or Fullstory Relay. These options point to your first-party domain instead of Fullstory's domain, so it should allow you to circumvent script-blocking extensions and capture these users.
Reason #6: Your Fullstory account has Split Processing enabled.
For customers that have a Fullstory Enterprise plan with our Data Direct add-on, you could be utilizing a feature called Split Processing. When this feature is enabled, only a percentage of your sessions will be retained within your Fullstory account while 100% of session data will be sent to your data warehouse.
To see the percentage of sessions retained in your account, see '% of Sessions for Fullstory Analytics' on the Settings > Subscription page within your Fullstory account.
Reason #7: Custom logic is being applied to sample sessions.
It's possible that sampling rules were applied to your account via custom code. This prevents some sessions from being captured.
We explain in more detail here why we do not typically recommend sampling.