Beginner Guide to Troubleshooting Matomo

If you don't think data is arriving in your Matomo dashboard, here are three sequential types of troubleshooting:
1) Type 1: Test your website in the browser. Load some specific pages you are monitoring into Firefox, Chrome, or similar. Watch browser >> developer tools >> network tab. Confirm that a tracking signal goes to Matomo.
2) Type 2: As you navigate your website, watch in the Matomo dashboard: Matomo >> Visitors >> Visits log. This is the raw, unenriched, unmanipulated data. Confirm that all of your website traffic arrives there.
3) Type 3: If everything looks good in 1 and , 2, now for your troubleshooting, check the numbers in the rest of Matomo (this is the enriched, manipulated data, after matomo's backend php modifies it). Look especially at matomo >> Behavior >> Pages maybe.

Type 1: Test your website in the browser.

The Matomo pageview event can be manually observed in your browser devtools.

In the case above we have configured a Javascript tracker on our website (pikl.us website) to monitor pageviews. The deluxe twist is we are sending the pageview to two Matomo servers. We set this up using the instructions here: https://matomo.org/faq/how-to/how-do-i-send-tracking-requests-to-two-or-more-matomo-servers/

Since it is easy (and catastrophic to data) to miss a pageview event, we want to confirm that we set it up correctly. (It's a common mistake to set up two servers and later discover that the data is uneven because you are only sending to the most recently set server.) Let's troubleshoot this in Developer Tools in the browser.

To confirm the pageviews are actually happening, do the following:

1. Open up devtools in your browser. Go to browser >> other tools >> developer tools >> network tab
2. Enter the URL of your website you want to monitor
3. Find a pair of requests. They will likely be POST http requests and they will have no payload, hence the size will be 0 kilobytes.
4. It's easy to see the request(s) by filtering for .php extension in the filter bar.
5. Success! In the screenshot above you can see that we have a pair of POST requests going to our endpoints of littlefurnace.com/matomo/matomo.php and tatll.matomo.cloud/matomo.php.  The hypertext transfer protocol content of the request is shown in the right margin of the devtools window

In my case, the POST request contains the following:

https://tatll.matomo.cloud/matomo.php?action_name=pikL&
idsite=6&
rec=1&
r=333268&
h=9&
m=13&
s=44&
url=https://pikl.us/linksPage.php&
_id=675de8e438add64b&
_idn=0&
send_image=0&
_refts=0&
pdf=1&
qt=0&
realp=0&
wma=0&
fla=0&
java=0&
ag=0&
cookie=1&
res=2560x1080&
pv_id=U80TLm&
pf_net=292&
pf_srv=72&
pf_tfr=0&
uadata={}

If you would like to learn more about the parameters in the request, see the Matomo parameters documentation here:
https://developer.matomo.org/api-reference/tracking-api

TODO:
Specific examples of troubleshooting, Type 2 and Type 3, will be added here in the future.