View incoming container requests

Updated August 2026 · 3 min read

Confirm that events actually reach your TagVolt container, and understand the difference between what arrives, what your container sends onward, and what Google Tag Manager Preview shows.

The question this answers

When something is missing from a reporting platform, the fault is in one of three places: the event never left the website, it never reached your container, or it reached the container and something inside it went wrong.

Looking at incoming requests settles the middle question definitively, and it is the cheapest one to check. If nothing is arriving, no amount of debugging inside Google Tag Manager will help.

Incoming and outgoing are different views

Your container's Logs separate the two directions, and they answer different questions:

• Incoming — requests that reached your container. Proof the event left the browser and found the right address.
• Outgoing — deliveries your container made to destinations afterwards. Proof the container acted on what it received.

Work in that order. An event missing from Incoming has not reached TagVolt at all, and nothing downstream can be the cause.

Confirm events are arriving

Load your site in another tab and trigger the action you care about — a page view, an add-to-cart, a form submission — then look at Incoming for your container.

If requests appear, your site is talking to your container correctly and the problem is further down the chain.

If nothing appears, the event is not reaching TagVolt. The usual causes are a tag still pointing at a default endpoint rather than your container, a domain that has not finished setting up, or a content blocker preventing the request. Work through Events not showing up.

Reading further back

Incoming logs are also how you look at what happened earlier, rather than only what is happening while you watch. For retention behaviour and how to work with longer periods, see Container logs.

How this relates to Google Tag Manager Preview

These are different layers, and you will use both:

| Question | Where to look | |---|---| | Did the event reach my container? | Incoming requests, here | | Did my container deliver it onward? | Outgoing requests | | Which client claimed it, which tags fired, what payload was built? | Google Tag Manager Preview |

TagVolt shows you the traffic at your container's edge. Google Tag Manager Preview shows you the reasoning inside the server container — client claiming, tag firing, variable values.

Debugging real visitor traffic in Preview

Google Tag Manager Preview normally shows only your own session, which is little help when a problem affects other people and not you.

To route selected live requests from your container into your Google Tag Manager Preview session, use sGTM Live Debug. That guide owns everything about Preview routing: obtaining the X-Gtm-Server-Preview value, the exact-path and source-IP selectors, session behaviour, and how to end a session.

If you also need your testing not to create real conversions, pair it with Ad-Safe Test Mode.

FAQ

Does an event in Incoming mean my tags worked?

No. It means the request reached your container. What happened next — which client claimed it and which tags fired — is visible in Google Tag Manager Preview, and the resulting deliveries appear in Outgoing.

Why would a request appear in Incoming but not in Outgoing?

Because the container received it but produced no delivery from it. That is a Google Tag Manager server container question: usually a client not claiming the request, or a tag whose trigger did not match.

Can I watch another person's traffic here?

Incoming shows requests reaching your container regardless of who sent them. To follow specific live traffic through Google Tag Manager Preview instead, use sGTM Live Debug with its source-IP selector.

Nothing arrives at all — where do I start?

Events not showing up walks the usual causes in order, starting with whether your tags point at your container's URL.