Eventits

Eventits are discrete units of information that represent individual occurrences within an event stream in modern data systems. In event-driven architectures, an eventit captures a moment in time and a defined set of attributes that describe what happened, where it originated, and under what conditions.

A typical eventit includes a timestamp, an event_type, a source_id, and a unique event_id. The payload carries domain data, while metadata may include priority, version, lineage, and a hash for integrity. Some designs separate the immutable identity from contextual data, others store them together.

Eventits can be simple or extended. Simple eventits carry minimal metadata; extended variants include schemas, validation rules, and relationships to other eventits, such as causality links or correlation identifiers. In streaming platforms, eventits are the units processed by analyzers, stores, and downstream services.

Applications include real-time analytics, monitoring and alerting, auditing and traceability, debugging, and support for event-sourcing architectures, where state is reconstructed from a time-ordered log of eventits. They are commonly stored in append-only logs or event stores and consumed by stream processors and databases optimized for time-series data.

Etymology and usage: "eventit" is a neologism used in some practitioner and scholarly discussions to describe an individual event instance, distinct from higher-level concepts such as event types or streams. It is not universally standardized; many communities use terms like event, event record, or event message instead. The concept emphasizes unit-level granularity in event streams and is central to event-driven design and stream processing.