Eventmonitors

Eventmonitors are software components that observe streams of events within an information system to track activity, detect anomalies, and support operational decision making. They focus on real-time or near-real-time observation of events such as errors, state transitions, requests, transactions, and performance metrics, rather than solely collecting static logs.

Key capabilities of eventmonitors include capturing events from instrumentation, filtering to relevant signals, correlating events across services, aggregating metrics, and generating alerts or automated responses. They typically feed dashboards, runbooks, or incident-management systems, and may persist summarized event data for auditing and compliance.

Architectures for eventmonitors commonly involve an event source layer (instrumented applications, infrastructure monitors, or external services), an event bus or message queue, and a processing layer that analyzes streams and triggers actions. They can be push-based, with agents emitting events, or pull-based, with monitors polling endpoints. They integrate with cloud monitoring suites, on-premises observability stacks, and security information and event management (SIEM) systems.

Types of eventmonitors include health monitors (uptime, resource usage), performance monitors (latency, throughput), security monitors (access events, anomaly detection), business monitors (order status, inventory changes), and compliance monitors (policy violations). In practice, eventmonitors provide visibility in microservices, serverless environments, and distributed systems to enable proactive responses and continual improvement.

Challenges include noise management, false positives, evolving event schemas, data privacy considerations, and scaling to high event volumes. Best practices emphasize instrumenting key signals, defining clear thresholds and alert policies, using event correlation to reduce redundancy, and aligning data retention with governance requirements.