Create custom events

Use custom events to capture metrics (errors, page loads, and core web vitals) specific to your organization's use cases, such as understanding drop off rates during a checkout workflow.

Create custom events to capture meaningful metrics about customer journeys and user behavior on your site. Custom events support filtering by tags and the ability to add custom attributes.

How custom events can add value to your organization

Splunk RUM automatically collects metrics about page loads, errors, and core web vitals. Sometimes, you need custom logic to capture a specific workflow that is important to your organization to understand.

Use case

Suppose you are an online retailer. A meaningful custom event for your business might be understanding behavior around conversion rates and why users drop off and don’t finish a checkout workflow. You might also want to understand where users are stagnating in your application. You can create a custom event to discover which events precipitate an unsuccessful customer journey. Perhaps users are stopped by an error in your checkout workflow, or are unable to enter a promo code. Custom events provide the opportunity for you to see a unique perspective on your data driven by the questions that matter most to you.

Create a custom event

The following examples show how to create a custom event for browser, Android, and iOS applications.

Browser

To create a custom event, first declare the tracer, and next define the custom event.

You can declare the tracer through either CDN or NPM. You need to declare the tracer only once. For more information on the difference between CDN and NPM, see Instrument your web application for Splunk RUM.

The following example shows how to initialize the tracer and create a custom event using the NPM package:

import {trace} from '@opentelemetry/api'

const tracer = trace.getTracer('appModuleLoader');
const span = tracer.startSpan('test.module.load', {
attributes: {
      'workflow.name': 'test.module.load'
}
});
// time passes
span.end();

Android

You can report custom events and workflows happening in your Android application using the addRumEvent and startWorkflow APIs.

The following example shows how to report when a user closes a help dialog box:

public Dialog onCreateDialog(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
      LayoutInflater inflater = LayoutInflater.from(activity);
      View alertView = inflater.inflate(R.layout.sample_mail_dialog, null);
      AlertDialog.Builder builder = new AlertDialog.Builder(activity);
      builder.setView(alertView)
            .setNegativeButton(R.string.cancel, (dialog, id) ->
                  // Record a simple "zero duration" span with the provided name and attributes
                     SplunkRum.getInstance().addRumEvent("User Rejected Help", HELPER_ATTRIBUTES));
      return builder.create();
}

The following example shows how to start a workflow for which metrics are recorded by Splunk RUM. To record the workflow you must end the OpenTelemetry span instance:

binding.buttonWork.setOnClickListener(v -> {
   Span hardWorker =
            SplunkRum.getInstance().startWorkflow("Main thread working hard");
   try {
         Random random = new Random();
         long startTime = System.currentTimeMillis();
         while (true) {
            random.nextDouble();
            if (System.currentTimeMillis() - startTime > 20_000) {
            break;
            }
         }
   } finally {
         hardWorker.end();
   }
});

iOS

The following example shows how to use the OTel Swift API to report on a function you want to time:

func calculateTax() {
      let tracer = OpenTelemetrySDK.instance.tracerProvider.get(instrumentationName: "MyApp")
      let span = tracer.spanBuilder(spanName: "calculateTax").startSpan()
      span.setAttribute(key: "numClaims", value: claims.count)
      span.setAttribute(key: "workflow.name", value: "<your_workflow>") // This allows the event to appear in the UI
   //...
   //...
      span.end() // You can also use defer for this
}

This example shows how to record an event with no duration:

let dictionary: NSDictionary = [
                  "attribute1": "hello",
                  "attribute2": "world!",
                  "attribute3": 3
]
SplunkRum.reportEvent(name: "testEvent", attributes: dictionary)

Note: If you want a custom event to appear in the UI, you must set the attribute workflow.name for it. Without the workflow.name attribute, the span is still recorded but only appears in the request waterfall view.

Next steps with custom events

For examples, dashboards, and metrics related to custom events, see the following topics:

Advanced instrumentation

For more information on advanced instrumentation, see the following topics:

Documentation