StatusEvents

StatusEvents are a class of events used in information systems to signal changes in the status of a component, service, task, or process. They focus on state rather than actions and are widely used in event-driven architectures, monitoring, and automation to provide a real-time view of system health and progress.

A typical StatusEvent includes a timestamp, source, a status value, and optional fields such as a human-readable message, details, severity, and a correlation identifier. Status values commonly express conditions like online/offline, ok/degraded/failed, running/completed/pending, or started/stopped.

Use cases include real-time dashboards and alerting, auto-scaling and remediation, auditing and compliance, and postmortem analysis. StatusEvents enable operators and automated systems to detect outages, track progress, and trigger workflows based on state changes.

Design considerations include adopting a standard schema for status values to ensure interoperability, and designing for extensibility while maintaining backward compatibility. It is important to balance the richness of the payload with privacy and security constraints, and to consider ordering, deduplication, and delivery guarantees. Define how to handle conflicting or missing statuses from multiple sources, and establish clear ownership of status definitions.

Relation to related concepts: StatusEvents are a form of telemetry alongside logs and metrics and are used by monitoring, orchestration, and resilience tooling. They can be transported through message brokers, event streams, or HTTP endpoints and should be documented and versioned to support long-term use.