How the Live chart on your request log works

At the top of every domain's Request logs page sits the Live chart: how many requests reached your tagging address in each of the last 30 minutes. It is the quickest answer to the question "is tracking coming in right now?", for example straight after you install the tracking script, publish a container or launch a campaign.

What the chart shows

Each bar is one minute, with the oldest on the left and the newest on the right. The labels underneath show the time of the first bar, the middle bar and "now", in your own browser's time zone.

• The last bar is the current minute. It is still filling up, so it is usually lower than the bars before it. That is not a drop.
• Empty minutes stay on the chart. A minute without requests shows as a flat line at the bottom, so a gap is visible instead of the bars simply closing up.
• Hover over a bar, or tab to it with the keyboard, to see the exact count and the minute it belongs to.
• The scale follows your traffic. The busiest minute fills most of the height with a little room above it, and the scale never goes below four requests, so one or two requests on a quiet site don't look like a peak.

The line under the title says when the last request arrived, for example "Last request 12s ago". That time is measured with the server's clock, so a wrong clock on your own computer can't make it look stale.

What counts as a request

Every request that reaches your tagging address counts, whatever it is for and whatever status it got: loads of your GTM container and the Enhanced loader, GA4 and Google tag hits, ad-block protected requests, Preview mode traffic and the rest of the request types. Failed requests count too, so a burst of errors still shows up as activity.

Two kinds of traffic are left out:

• Bots and crawlers. Requests that Measurebase recognises as a bot, a crawler or a scanner are not counted, the same rule the request table underneath uses. How bot detection works.
• The status check. Measurebase checks the health of your tagging address by requesting its bare root path. Those checks are not your traffic, so they never appear.

The chart counts requests, not visitors or events. One page view usually makes several requests (the container script, a GA4 hit, perhaps a Google Ads hit), so don't expect the numbers to match the users or sessions in GA4.

How fresh it is

While the page is open, the chart asks for new numbers every 15 seconds. Before answering, Measurebase reads the newest lines from your tagging server's access log, at most once every 10 seconds no matter how many people are watching. When nobody has the page open, the same log is imported every 5 minutes. In practice a request shows up in the chart within about half a minute.

The chart pauses while the tab is in the background and catches up the moment you come back. The request table underneath refreshes on the same 15-second beat, but it holds still while you are on a later page, have a row opened or are running a manual refresh, so rows never move while you read them.

Reading gaps and spikes

• A flat line and an old "Last request". Nothing is reaching your tagging address. Check that your site still loads the tracking script and that your DNS record still points at Measurebase. If this lasts, the no-data alert tells you as well.
• Bars, but your reports stay empty. Requests arrive, but something after them fails. Filter the table on errors and check the status badges.
• A sudden spike. Often a campaign or a newsletter going out. It can also be a crawler that isn't recognised as a bot yet, or a tag that fires twice; duplicate tracking explains how to spot that.
• A minute or two at zero on a small site. Normal. Quiet sites simply have quiet minutes.
• A "Dummy data" label. Demo domains show generated numbers so you can see how the chart behaves. Your own domains always show real traffic.

For anything older than half an hour, or for a closer look at single requests, use the table under the chart or export the log.