Definition
Events record discrete operational occurrences, such as restarts, configuration changes, failovers, and rollouts.
Question it answers
Which changes or lifecycle transitions occurred near the start of the incident?
Role in an investigation
Build a timeline using occurrence time and affected resources. Compare events with telemetry for the same service and environment. A change occurring before errors is a candidate explanation that still needs a plausible mechanism and independent evidence.
Correlation fields
| Field or dimension | Purpose |
|---|---|
| occurred_at and observed_at | Preserve event ordering and account for delayed delivery. |
| event ID and change type | Distinguish one occurrence from repeated notifications. |
| service, environment, and resource identity | Limit comparison to systems affected by the occurrence. |
Compare a restart with error onset
A database failover event precedes a short checkout error spike. Connection failures in application logs and recovery after reconnection strengthen the failover hypothesis. A timestamp marker alone would not explain the failure path.
Limitations
- Events can arrive late or use clocks that disagree with application hosts.
- One change may affect several resources; missing scope makes comparison ambiguous.
- Repeated delivery can create multiple records of one occurrence.
Supported by
Documented examples, not an exhaustive compatibility list. Features require suitable instrumentation and configuration; availability can depend on the runtime, backend, and subscription.
- Grafana — Annotations display events alongside metric time series.
Investigation patterns
- Deployments to Error Rate
- Alerts to Incidents
- Infrastructure to Applications
- User Session to Backend Trace
- Queue Producer to Consumer
Related concepts
Related guides
- What is Observability?
- What is MTTR?
- Deployments: Compare Error Rate by Version
- OpenTelemetry: Queue Context, Retries and Batches
FAQ
Are deployment events enough for release analysis?
They establish a timeline. Version attributes and affected cohorts are needed to connect a rollout to specific traffic.