Business events are an important concept and central to Dynatrace Business Observability. Business events generate business-grade data to enable important use cases.
An event is an action or occurrence that takes place within a system or a service, such as when a customer completes a satisfaction survey or when a user selects a subscribe button. The system produces a signal when an event occurs. An event becomes a business event when it generates business-grade data. Dynatrace prioritizes business events separately from observability data to ensure business-grade data.
Business-grade data is precise data that doesn't rely on samples to report baselines, identify trends, or alert on anomalies with statistical accuracy. It relies on complete and accurate data to inform businesses about system performance and anomalies in real time. Business events deliver complete and precise data to support demanding business use cases, and to support IT use cases where full accuracy is required.
Business-grade data is:
All events are captured without sampling.
All events can be queried without extrapolation.
Events are available immediately after they occur.
There is no limit to the number of events generated.
Events are not aggregated as they age.
The event retention period is up to ten years.
Events are stored with topology context.
Events captured include those generated by OneAgent, RUM, logs, and external sources.
Events are stored in a single data store (Grail) and accessed through a single query language, DQL.
Business-grade data is often required for business decisions and reporting where precision is critical. Contrast this with typical IT reporting which achieves statistical accuracy through sampling and extrapolation.
The business event dataflow in Dynatrace has three stages:
Capture
Business event data can be ingested from OneAgent, the RUM JavaScript API, and external sources.
Process
Pipelines process incoming business events to improve analysis and reporting. Processing options include filtering, parsing, enriching, transforming, or assigning a retention period.
Analyze
Data stored in Grail™ can be explored using the Dynatrace Query Language, DQL to discover patterns, identify anomalies and outliers, report on trends, and more. DQL queries are also used to build dashboards, charts, metrics, and reports. You can use DQL to export selected data to external tools.
Business events represent meaningful actions within systems that generate business-grade data. To maintain a level of precision, each event requires consistent, identifying metadata that describes where it originated, how it fits within a functional domain, and what action occurred.
The table below contains examples business events data fields.
| Field | Type | Description | Examples | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| string | Source of the event, such as the name of the component or system that generated the event. | Mandatory |
|
| string | The unique type identifier of a given event. It grants granularity to the event and specifies the exact action or occurrence being reported. | Mandatory |
|
| string | Standard categorization based on the significance of an event according to the ITIL event management standard. This can be used to quickly understand the general area of activity. | Optional |
|
To keep business event fields consistent, Dynatrace uses Semantic Dictionary which provides standardized field names and meaning throughout Grail. This ensures business events follow a common structure and can be correlated reliably across domains.