Live events

Read time: 4 minutes

Last edited: Feb 27, 2023

Overview

This topic explains how to use live events.

The Live events page gives you real-time insight into the events your application is sending to LaunchDarkly, so you can ensure that you've set up LaunchDarkly correctly. Different types of events appear, in detail or in summary, depending on what you want to view.

Using live events

The Live events page shows you a real-time stream of events arriving in LaunchDarkly from your app. When you first open the page, it connects to the event stream to show events as they appear. Establishing the connection can take up to 30 seconds, but the connection state updates to show you the connection process status. In high-volume environments, it may display sampled events, rather than 100% of events.

Use the Flags, Contexts, and Experiments filters to view subsets of your live events. Use the search bar to search for specific events by context or event type, key, or kind.

The "Live events" page, including the filters and search bar.

The Live events page must be active to work

The Live events page does not process new events when it is not the active tab in your browser. Leave it open and visible to view new events as they occur. If you need to click around in your app to generate events, open your app in a second window.

The Live events page will time out after ten minutes of inactivity. After the timeout, click the prompt to keep loading events.

The connection state for the Live events page indicates if events have occurred in your environment recently.

Live events page, connected to live event stream with recent events.

If your environment has not registered any events, the status updates to indicate that. If you receive this status frequently, it may mean that you have configured your SDK incorrectly. To learn more, read SDKs.

Flag events connected to live event stream, but with no recent evaluations.

If there is an issue connecting to the event stream, a disconnected status message appears. This may appear because of an internal error or network disruptions. Refresh your browser, or click the Resume button to reconnect:

The "Live events" page header, with the disconnected status message and "Resume" button called out.

Flag events

To view live events by flag, use the Flags filter.

Here is an image of the Live events page, filtered by flags:

The Live events page, showing flag events.

There are three types of events that can appear on the Live events page when you filter by flags:

Feature events
Summary events
Debug events

Feature events include specific flag evaluation details. For more information about the contexts used in the flag evaluation, click View attributes. The Attribute viewer dialog appears. It lists the context attributes and includes a link to the context details page.

Summary events display a summary of flag evaluation events. This saves data load. To review detailed evaluation event information for a flag, click Full fidelity details.

Older SDK versions send detailed events for every evaluation, rather than summary events.

Click to expand the minimum required SDK version to use summary events

The minimum required version for each SDK to use summary events is:

.NET: 5.0.0
Go: 4.0.0
Java: 4.0.0
Node: 5.0.0
Python: 6.0.0
Ruby: 4.0.0
Rust: 1.0.0-beta.1
JavaScript: 2.0.0
Android: 2.4.0
iOS: 2.13.0
PHP: The PHP SDK does not itself support summary events. However, when PHP is used with LD Relay, the LD Relay event forwarding mode has the ability to turn the events received from the PHP SDK into summary events. This requires that you are using PHP SDK version 3.1.0 or higher. If you are using LD Relay with PHP you will need to upgrade LD Relay to version 4.0.0 or higher. Other SDKs do not require an LD Relay update to use summary events.

Debug events describe feature flag evaluations when debugging mode is on in your SDK. They are listed when you view the Full fidelity details of a summary event for a flag.

Context events

To view only live events related to specific contexts, use the Contexts events filter.

Here is an image of the Live events page, filtered to show context events:

There are two types of context events that display on the Live events page:

Identify events are explicitly triggered by your application code
Index events are automatically triggered by the LaunchDarkly SDK based on flag evaluations

For more information about the context, click View attributes. The Attribute viewer dialog appears. It lists the context attributes and includes a link to the context details page.

Context events do not display information about the specific flag that was evaluated for this context. To find the corresponding flag, you can copy the context key, from the "Key" column, and then search for that key under the Flags filter.

The list of context events, with the "Copy to clipboard" button and the search field called out.

Experimentation events

To view only live events from your experiments, use the Experiments events filter. The Experiments events filter only displays for customers who have Experimentation enabled. To learn more, read About Experimentation.

Here is an image of the Live events page, filtered to show Experimentation events:

There are three types of experiment events that display on the Live events page::

Click events
Page view events
Custom events

These events correspond to the kind of metric that triggered the event.

For more information about the experiment, click the name of the experiment in the "Event" column.

For more information about the context participating in the experiment, click View attributes. The Attribute viewer dialog appears. It lists the context attributes and includes a link to the context details page.

Event schema

This topic describes the different types of live events. For details on the JSON schema for each type of event, read Data Export schema reference.