Events

To make full use of Loggr you'll need to understand how to use all the fields of an event. Each field will affect how it can be viewed in the log.

See Also: Posting Events.

The following is a list of all the fields that can be posted in an event. The only required field is text.

• text (max 500 chars, required)
• link (max 200 chars)
• source (max 200 chars)
• user (max 200 chars)
• tags (max 200 chars)
• value (max 30 chars)
• data (max 5120 chars)
• geo (max 30 chars)

When posting the event, each can be specified as part of the POST data. We recommend that you URL encode each field before posting. Let me explain each one...

event.text

The text field is the primary field of an event and is always required.

event.link

If your event has a related URL, send that in the link field

event.source

The source field is typically where you would specify the origination of your event (although you can use it for whatever you want). Sometimes we use it to indicate the tier of your software stack, like 'web client'. Sometimes we use it to specify the server name in our web farm. For errors we use it to indicate a location in the source.

event.user

It is very common to have the notion of a user within your monitored apps. The user field is where you would record the user's username. This makes it very easy to see all activity for a specific user when you're analysing your event logs.

event.tags

The tags field allows you to tag events to make analysis and segmenting easier. We recommend coming up with a discrete set of tags for your events from the start. The tags field is set using a space-delimited list of tags like this:

In this case we chose to record when a comment is created on our blog. By providing the object (comment) and the action (created) we can easily track all events for comments, maybe created, deleted or edited. We can also segment our events by the created tag and see new comments, posts, users, etc.

event.value

Each event can have a numeric value associated with it. Loggr will provide additional analytic tools for showing those value. Provide a value like this:

Loggr will attempt to convert the value you pass to a decimal. If you post a value and it cannot be converted to a decimal, you will receive an error.

event.data

In some cases your event may need to include extra information. The data field is where that information is sent. You can send up to 5k of data in this field. You can also tell Loggr that the field should be displayed as HTML using a special prefix like this:

The @html prefix must be on a line by itself and must be the first line. If that prefix is not used, the data will be treated as plain text.

event.geo

The geo field aloows you to send geo-code information about the event. Currently this field accepts two forms of geo-coding: lat/lon and ip address. To send latitude and longitude send them like this:

Loggr will store those values directly without any translation.

It is very common to have the IP address of your clients. You can geo-code your events by passing an IP address like this:

Loggr will attempt to translate that into a latitude and longitude using our geo database.

See Also: Posting Events.