So, we’ve been using Matomo for nearly a year now. Just last week we installed Custom Reports. When I try to view previous months in Custom Reports, it tells me the only way I can view them is to Invalidate Reports. I’ve downloaded the plugin, but before I use it, I just want to know what are the consequences of doing this? I can’t find any tutorials or anything on using it.
Does the previous data remain in place, even though it’s been invalidated?
We have 4 Matomo users at the moment, if i invalidate the reports, does that carry across all users?
If anyone has any advice on using it, please let me know!
Hi Colm,
I’m also not an experienced matomo user / admin yet, but this is my take on most of your questions (please take them with a grain of salt unless an experienced user confirms them - or just risk it)
Does the previous data remain in place, even though it’s been invalidated?
Yes, the data still exists but needs to be reprocessed. So you don’t loose anything except the time it takes to reprocess the data.
We have 4 Matomo users at the moment, if i invalidate the reports, does that carry across all users?
Yes, it will carry across all users, meaning all will have to wait for the reprocessing to be done.
I hope that helps (at least a bit). It is a bit confusing that the “How do I get reporting data …” guide article talks about invalidating historical data while it should read invalidating historical records or archives. As far as I understand matomo, log data is never invalidated only processed data (which is stored in archives) can be invalidated.
Ok, thanks for that. Sounds like no harm so. I assume Matomo will keep processing the current days whilst it’s reprocessing the old data, so we won’t be missing any days? I think we can live without actually accessing the dashboard for a while, just don’t want any gap days in our history.
It could take several invocations of core:archive to properly archive everything but in the end, there wouldn’t be a gap in the history. Maybe a temporary gap until everything is archived again. But the docs say you can have multiple core:archive processes running in parallel so there should be no harm in that.
Hi @dbx12, @colmmcs
In Matomo 2 kind of data are displayed.
Raw data, the ones you can see in the visits logs (and real-time logs). These ones can only be removed (or manually updated directly in the DB
Archived data, the ones you can see on all other reports. They are computed (archived) periodically (depending on configuration) from raw data, when the time range (day, week, month, etc.) is invalidated. Invalidation is automatic on current time range: current day, current week, etc. As soon as the time range is terminated (eg. the day time range of yesterday), one more invalidation occurs to be sure to compute the whole data of the whole time range.
