Key Concepts

• An Event is a noteworthy action. This could mean anything from a player completing a level to a CS agent scheduling maintenance mode on the game server.
• An Event Stream is a list of related events that share the same context. For example, “actions that a single player has performed” could be one event stream, while “changes that CS agents have made to an experiment” could be another.

Overview

Event streams are a way to visualize how something has changed over time. The “something” could be a player, a guild, an experiment or any number of other things. When actions that change one of these things are performed, those actions are recorded as events. An event stream shows a list of these events in a time-ordered fashion that you can navigate.

While event streams themselves are very dependent on the context that they are describing, they all share common features. This document describes those common features.

Quick Guide

The easiest place to see examples of event streams is on the player details page. Here you will find two examples:

There are two event streams visible here, each with a different context:

• Latest Player Events shows a list of events that have changed the player’s state. These could be actions that the player performed themselves (such as connecting to the game server or upgrading in-game items) or actions performed by CS agents (such as changing the player’s name).
• Latest Audit Log Events shows a list of events that CS agents have performed in relation to the player. This includes actions like banning the player or sending them an in-game mail.

The Anatomy of an Event

The display of each event always follows the same format:

An event is divided into four columns:

1. The first column shows the timestamp of the event and, below that, the time difference between this event and the previous one.
2. Secondly, some events can be grouped together into sessions. For example, all events that happen between a player’s connection and disconnection events are considered to be a session. For these events, a solid connection line is shown to help visualize the grouping.
3. Next is the title and description of the event. Some events (such as audit logs) will include the author of the event here too.
4. Finally, a link to take you to a dedicated page with more information about the event. Where this link takes you depends on what type of event stream you are looking at.

The title and description of an event is just a summary - every event actually holds much more information about what happened. Clicking on an individual event will expand it to show this information:

Event Folding

In most event streams, some event types are often seen repeated many times in a row. Imagine an event log for a game of chess where you would most likely see dozens of “move piece” events, one after another without any interruption. Events like this are automatically “folded” into a single group before they are visualized as an event stream. This makes it much easier to see the interesting events without getting flooded by the uninteresting ones. Groups of events can always be expanded by clicking on them. For player events streams, entire gameplay sessions are also folded up into a single action that can be expanded by clicking on them.

Searching and Filtering Events

Event streams can be searched to find interesting events. There are two ways to do this:

1. Typing text into the search box.
2. Choose from the automatically populated list of available events types.

TIP

Pro Tip: Searching is inclusive - if an event matches either the text in the search box or any of the selected event types then it will be found.

Further Reading

One of the most common uses of event streams is to look at what players have been up to. Whilst some of the events that you will see in these player event streams come from the core Metaplay SDK, many of them will be game specific. These game specific events will need to be implemented by you. Take a look at Implementing Analytics Events in Game Logic for how to do this.