Hide, block, or delete an event or property

For many customers, the differences between hiding, blocking, and deleting an event or property from your tracking plan aren't immediately clear. For example, hidden or blocked events and properties still count towards your project's instrumentation limit, whereas deleted events and properties don't.

selected event property in data.png

Note

These options will only appear in the menu at the top of Amplitude Data after you select an event or property. The options aren't visible prior to that.

This article answers some frequently asked questions about the similarities and differences between each option.

What is a hidden event or property?

If you don't want your users to query on an event or property in Amplitude charts, but do still want to collect data for that event or property, consider hiding it.

You can hide an event or property from drop-downs, Pathfinder results, and Personas charts:

Hiding from drop-downs means you can't select that event or property from drop-down lists in any Amplitude chart.
If you hide the event or property from Pathfinder or Personas results, that event aren't included in those chart's calculations. However, Amplitude ingests the data for the event or property, and it's queryable again after you unhide it.

What does blocking an event or property do?

When you block an event or property, you're telling Amplitude you want to continue to query on historical data, but would like to stop collecting new data for that event or property. This can be helpful if a particular event is causing you to hit your monthly event volume limit.

When you do this, Amplitude stops ingesting and processing the event or property. Blocked events and properties ingested prior to blocking are selectable in drop-downs and used in charts. Data from after you create a block doesn't appear in user streams or chart results.

Blocking an event or property doesn't stop you from sending that data to Amplitude, so you still receive a success response when you send it. However Amplitude drops that data before the processing stage, and you can't recover it.

What happens to deleted events and properties?

If you've instrumented an event or property that you no longer need, deleting it helps you keep your data structure organized. Too many unnecessary events and properties can lead to hitting your project's instrumentation limit.

As with blocking, Amplitude doesn't ingest deleted events and properties, and the data sent after deleting an event or property isn't recoverable. The difference is that deleted events and properties aren't available in drop-downs.

Charts that include the now-deleted event or property are available, but you can't include it in any new charts. If you removed the deleted event from a chart, you can't add it back it unless you undelete it. However, deleted events still appear in chart results, so if you'd like to remove/hide data from charts for a deleted event, create a drop filter prior to deleting the event.

What are the differences between hiding, blocking, and deleting?

Table Comparison

	Blocked from Ingestion	Available in data exports	Available in chart dropdowns	Count towards monthly event volume limit	Count towards 2000 event type limit	In Govern
Blocked	Yes	No	Yes	No	Yes	All, Blocked
Deleted	Yes	No	No	No	No	Deleted
Hidden	No	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	All, Live, Hidden