The Events stream
Watch a live tail of your raw events as they arrive, and inspect the exact payload of any single event.
The Events page is a live tail of your raw events, newest first. It is the fastest way to answer two questions: "is my data actually arriving?" and "what exactly is in this event?" You will find it in the main navigation, labelled Events.
A live view, not a chart
Dashboards and widgets summarise your events into numbers and charts. The Events stream does the opposite: it shows you the individual events themselves, one row at a time, as raw as they were sent. It is a debugging and confirmation tool, not an analysis tool.
What you see
Events show up newest first, so the most recent thing that happened in your app or game sits at the top. As new events arrive they land at the top of the list, giving you a running feed of activity in real time.
What each row shows
Every row is one event. It lays out the core fields so you can read an event at a glance, plus the full set of properties you attached.
| Column | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Event name | The name you sent, like player_join or purchase. |
| Source | The free-text _source label, if you set one (for example a region or shard like eu-west-1). |
| Actor | The _actor the event belongs to, if you set one (for example user_123). See Actors. |
| Timestamp | When the event happened. |
| Properties | The custom key/value pairs you attached under properties. |
For example, if your backend sends this event:
{
"name": "player_join",
"properties": { "map": "desert", "perks": ["double_jump", "shield"] },
"_source": "eu-west-1",
"_actor": "user_123"
}the row will read player_join as the name, eu-west-1 as the source,
user_123 as the actor, and show the map and perks properties alongside it.
List properties
When a property is a list (an array like ["double_jump", "shield"]), the row
shows its values together, so you can see every value the event carried. Lists
are how one event can count toward several values at once, more in
Property types.
Switching environments
Every workspace has two separate streams of data, production and development, and an event lands in one of them based on the API key it was sent with. The Events page has a Production / Development toggle at the top that switches which environment you are looking at.
This matters when you are testing. Point your test traffic at a development key, flip the toggle to Development, and you can watch your test events arrive without mixing them into your real production data. When you are ready to check live traffic, flip back to Production. More on environments and keys in Core concepts.
When to use it
There are two everyday jobs the Events stream is built for.
- Confirm your data is arriving. Right after you wire up your first event (see Getting started), open the Events page and send a test event. If it shows up at the top of the list, your key and payload are correct and the rest of the product will have data to work with. If nothing appears, you know the problem is upstream, before TopStats ever saw it.
- Inspect exact payloads. When a chart looks off, or a property is not breaking down the way you expect, the Events stream lets you read the real event to see precisely what was sent, including the exact property names and values. It is the ground truth you check your assumptions against.
If an event is not showing the property you expected, or a value looks like a string when you meant it to be a number, compare the row here against what your code is sending. The Sending events page covers the payload fields and how each value type is handled.