Privacy Requests: Identifying & Debugging Issues

Introduction

In this tutorial, you'll learn how to review the event logs for a privacy request and identify issues that may require debugging.

Prerequisites

For this tutorial, you'll need:

• A Fides Cloud or Fides Enterprise account
• The role of either Owner, View & Approver or Approver to manage privacy requests.
• At least one system integration configured for privacy requests. Read how to configure an integration.
• A privacy center to receive and process privacy requests. Read how to configure a privacy center.

Identifying Privacy Request Issues

From time-to-time, privacy requests can fail to process completely. This is often due to the sheer number of systems connected in a privacy process and how they depend on each other to complete successfully. A common reason for a privacy request to fail is expired credentials to a system, however, there can be a variety of other reasons. Identifying the cause as quickly as possible to remediate it is key.

Fides provides a detailed events and activities log for this very reason. Let's take a walk through of the feature now.

Viewing Request Logs

To view the event logs for a given request, click the kebab menu ... and select View Details as follows:

If the privacy request has already been processed, the event logs will show a list of the processed systems under Events and Logs as shown below:

To view the the details of a specific system's privacy request processing, click on "View Details" and then "View log" to show the detailed processing log for the system:

This detailed view of events shows exactly what action has been performed for each system and the available collections, so you can identify precisely where an issue occurs with a privacy request for debugging.

Downloading a Diagnostics Export

When the in-UI logs don't provide enough context to identify an issue, you can download a full diagnostics export for the request. The export is a structured JSON file containing execution metadata, task statuses, audit logs, timing information, and system configuration details — with no PII or secrets included — that you can share with Ethyca's support team.

To download a diagnostics export:

1. Navigate to Privacy Requests → Request Manager.
2. Click the Actions dropdown for the request.
3. Select Download troubleshooting data.

Fides generates the export and uploads it to your configured storage backend. If your storage uses a remote provider (such as S3 or GCS), the download starts automatically in your browser. If your storage is configured locally, a message will notify you that the file cannot be downloaded directly and you'll need to retrieve it from the server using the object_key returned by the API.