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Fields and Types

Fields¶

When you create an event you can send a JSON document which consists of multiple fields. Each field can contain event main information or metadata. Even though there is no strict format of such a JSON document we recommend to some of fields. An event can contain the following set of fields, most of which are optional:

Field Name	Field Type	Required	Notes
`timestamp`	date	no	Time when event happened (if not specified,current time will be assumed). The format is dateOptionalTime e.g.: `2014-02-17T21:37:04+0100` or`2014-02-17T14:15:01.534471+02:00`.
`type`	string	yes	Event type which could be e.g. `alert`, `deployment`, etc. Events are later grouped in timeline based on event type which significantly improves visibility.
`message`	string	yes	Short description of event, e.g. `Elasticsearch node03 onhost somehost06 restarted`. This is a default search field in Sematext UI, so it is good to keep it concise, but search-friendly. Data in this field can be stored in Markdown format to make your messages more pretty and easier to read. For more details see.
`title`	string	no	Event title, can be used as a short label for event, e.g. `Elasticsearch restart`.
`tags`	string array	no	Multivalued field. Each tag should be specified as aseparate array element e.g., `"tags":[ "elasticsearch", "restart", "emergency fix"]`
`severity`	string	no	A single-valued field which says what kind of an event it is. It should have such values as `error`, `info` or `warning` and let's you easily navigate through important and less important events.
`creator`	string	no	Person, application, or component that created an event. E.g. `John Smith`, `Elasticsearch`, `Some Batch Job`
`data`	string	no	Additional event data. It can be anything you may find useful to have along inside of event object. E.g., it could be stacktrace in case of `app_error` event,base64 encoded content of file, etc.

Types¶

Sematext Cloud helps you manage your events better and distinguish between different kinds of events when you provide event type as a JSON field. There are no limitations to the number of possible values of type field. To get the most value out of typed events we strongly suggest using a smaller number of distinct event types (1-10) to keep things manageable. Keeping the list of unique types concise help with faster navigation. Examples of recommended types: alert, server-info, deployment, infra, outage.

Note: when using curl to call the Events API, you may experience "SSL certificate problem" errors. The reason is that curl doesn't bundle any CA certs any more. For more info see this. Regardless of curl errors, HTTPS communication should be successful.

Example of well defined event¶

{
  "timestamp": "2019-05-30T09:58:43.455Z",
  "creator": "Jenkins",
  "host": "jenkins-host",
  "title": "Starting deployment",
  "message": "Started deployment of Test v1.23 to production",
  "severity": "info",
  "type": "deployment",
  "tags": ["version:1.23", "env:prod"],
}

Markdown in events¶

Event message supports markdown.

An example below. Notice message field which contains a text formatted with Markdown.

{
  "title": "Hello Sematext",
  "message": "### Hello Sematext\nClick [link](https://sematext.com/ \"Sematext\") \n",
  "tags": ["msg", "env:dev"],
  "severity": "info"
}

Markdown