An event is a specific action that takes place in an application. This could be a user clicking a button on a website, an error being logged, or a change in the state of a database. Events are essential for understanding the behavior and performance of a system.
We recommend to emit events from within your application when "something happens", such that these could be captured by your observability platform and used to detect, diagnose and resolve issues and anomalies.
You can record event as logs or as span events in distributed tracing.
Explore related concepts
Wide event
A wide event is a comprehensive data structure that contains all relevant details of a particular request or transaction within a single event, rather than distributing them across multiple events or logs.
Sampling
Sampling is the process of collecting and analyzing only a subset from a larger dataset, in order to make inferences or observations about the larger dataset. Sampling is about selecting a representative sample that represent the key features of the entire dataset without the cost associated with processing and storing the entire dataset.
Observability
Observability is the ability to understand how your application is working and behaving in production through telemetry data (logs, metrics, traces, wide events, etc.). It enables you detect, diagnose and resolve issues in your app before they impact your users and become problems.