Adobe Experience Platform: Count for failed identities seems disproportionate in relation to destination activation

At destination level, when in the Dataflow runs section of the UI, some metrics such as Identities Activated, Identities Excluded, & Identities Failed are showing at the top of the page. You may sometimes find the count of Identities Failed is very high and seems disproportionate when activating to destinations like Facebook or Google Customer Match.

Description

Here is a screenshot illustrating the above:

Resolution

When Adobe Experience Platform sends data to external partners, it’s sending this to their dedicated endpoint, and this endpoint will accept or refuse the incoming profiles.

The identity failures can occur because the profiles being activated at the Customer Match destination, for example, might contain unsupported identities. For instance, profiles with ECID as an identity wouldn’t activate, as this identity isn’t supported by Google Customer Match and thus contributes to the failed metrics.

Also from time to time a partner’s endpoint may be experiencing service disruptions, and consequently not receive the data at a certain point in time.

Moreover AEP has a retry mechanism, whereby the system will keep pushing failed attempts 5 times. In the current iteration of the UI and reporting, these retries are actually incrementing the count of failed identities you see in the UI, and this might lead to an inaccurate representation of your activation.