---
title: "When your data shows up"
description: "Test events appear within seconds; live events reach reports after the next processing run, a few hours later. How to tell which you are looking at."
canonical: "https://www.togohq.ai/docs/concepts/data-freshness"
applies_to: "Every Togo SDK, the dashboard and the MCP server"
updated: "2026-11-03T00:00:00Z"
---

# When your data shows up

Test events appear within seconds; live events reach reports after the next processing run, a few hours later. How to tell which you are looking at.

## Two speeds, on purpose

| You send with  | It shows up                   | Where                                                      |
| -------------- | ----------------------------- | ---------------------------------------------------------- |
| A **test** key | Within seconds                | The Live View tab and `verify_tracking` — never in reports |
| A **live** key | After the next processing run | Reports, the AI analyst, and every query tool              |

Live events are accepted the moment they arrive — the SDK gets its answer at once — and are then
processed in batches every few hours: matched to the right person, checked, and written to your
project's analytics data. Until that run, a live event is safe but not yet in any report.

So **an empty chart for the last hour is expected**, not a broken install. Check an install with
the test key instead ([Check that events arrive](/docs/verify)).

## How to tell how fresh a number is

Every answer from Togo says how far its data goes. In MCP tool results it is
`analyticsDataThrough`: the time up to which the project's data has been processed. A question
about anything after it — "today", "the last hour" — cannot be answered from it yet, and a correct
agent says so rather than reporting zero.

## When events arrive late

An event's time is when it **happened**, not when it arrived. An event queued on a phone on a
plane on Tuesday and delivered on Thursday lands in Tuesday’s numbers, and Togo corrects for a
device clock that is wrong. So a day that has already been processed can still gain events later.

Two limits apply: an event dated more than 5 minutes in the future, or more than 7 days in the
past, is refused ([`timestamp_too_far_future`](/docs/reference/event-diagnostics#timestamp_too_far_future),
[`timestamp_too_old`](/docs/reference/event-diagnostics#timestamp_too_old)).

## Confirming production right after a deploy

You do not have to wait for processing to know production is sending. In the dashboard, open
**Events → Live View** and switch to **Production**: it shows copies of live traffic for 20 minutes
— event and property names, never values.