Export events to your own S3 bucket

The S3 export writes every raw event of every site to your organisation's own bucket each night, for a data warehouse or your own records. It comes with the Enterprise plan.

Prepare the bucket

1. Make a bucket in the region you want, such as eu-central-1. Keep it private.
2. Make a user or role for Insights Orbit alone, with a policy that only lets it add files under one folder:

1{2  "Version": "2012-10-17",3  "Statement": [4    { "Effect": "Allow", "Action": "s3:PutObject", "Resource": "arn:aws:s3:::northwilds-insights-export/insights/*" }5  ]6}

1. Make an access key for it.

Storage that works like S3 outside Amazon, such as IONOS or Scaleway, works too: give its endpoint as well.

Set it up

1. An Admin opens S3 export under Developers.
2. Enter the bucket, region, folder, access key id and secret access key.
3. Select Test the connection. Insights Orbit writes a small file, _insights-orbit-check.txt, to the folder, and says what is wrong if it can't.
4. Select Set up the export.

The secret is kept sealed and never shown again. To change it, enter a new one; leave it empty to keep the old one. Pause stops the export until you start it again, and Remove forgets the bucket and key, leaving the files already written. Every change is in the audit trail.

The files

Every night, once the day is over in every site's time zone (and after 02:00 UTC at the earliest), Insights Orbit exports the day before, for each site that had events. A site's day runs from midnight to midnight in its own time zone, and date= is that local date:

insights/site=SITE_KEY/date=2026-10-21/events-0000.ndjson.gz

• Each file is gzipped, with one event per line as JSON, oldest first, with the same fields as the raw event API and the site's key as site.
• A day with more than 100,000 events is split into events-0000, events-0001 and so on.
• The site= and date= folders let Athena, BigQuery, Snowflake and similar tools read the files as partitions.
• Exporting a day again writes the same names, so a file is replaced rather than doubled.

The first export is for the day after you set it up. If the bucket can't be reached, S3 export shows why, and Insights Orbit tries again every few hours and catches up on up to seven missed days.