Raw Events

Learn how Statsig uses exposure events and custom events from your application to compute metrics and generate experiment results.

Statsig uses the raw events emitted by your application to compute a wide range of product metrics. These events contain the context needed to understand user behavior and infer user intentions.

Types of raw events

Statsig records two types of raw events from your application:

Exposure events track which users are assigned to control and test groups. This data allows Statsig to generate test results so you can evaluate the impact of new features and experiments. Exposure events also allow Statsig to assess the health of an experiment so you can make key decisions based on trustworthy data. Statsig requires exposure events at a minimum to generate experiment results.
Custom events track user actions and any events triggered during use of your application, including events that capture performance (for example, latency) or analytics data (for example, session start). These events allow Statsig to assess overall user engagement in your application (for example, daily active users, weekly stickiness) and changes in user behavior as you roll out new features and experiments.

When logging custom events, avoid using dot (.) notation in metadata keys. Keys containing dots are interpreted as nested paths during JSON parsing (e.g., by JSON_VALUE), which can cause the values to be parsed as NULL.

Unit identifiers

You must include at least one unit identifier when you record any raw events with Statsig. The unit identifier is required for two reasons:

To ensure that your users receive a consistent application experience when allocated to control or test groups in an experiment
To join exposure events with all custom events triggered by a given user to compute experiment results

Ingesting raw events

You can send raw events into Statsig in three ways.

Integrate with Statsig's client or server SDKs or HTTP API
Set up Statsig as a destination in a data connector such as Segment, mParticle, RudderStack and Census
Import from your data warehouse such as Snowflake, BigQuery, and Redshift.

When processing events, Statsig drops event names that contain this regex/character set:

"\\[\]{}<>#=;&$%|\u0000\n\r

Raw events in console

As you ingest custom events, they appear in the Metrics section under the Events tab in the Statsig console.

Events tab list view showing recent custom events

You can toggle between a list view or chart view of your events to view the trend line over time.

Chart view of events showing trend line over time

Statsig provides two unit identifiers by default: User ID and Stable ID. Select a unit identifier from the dropdown to view all events that include that unit identifier. Go to the guide to create custom ID types to create additional unit identifiers for your project.

Unit identifier dropdown for filtering events by user or stable ID

Billing

Statsig bills for the two types of raw events described above. Statsig bills only for production environment events.

Statsig records an Exposure Event for billing when you check a user for assignment in a Feature Gate or Experiment, or check for a value using a Dynamic Config.
The following checks are not billed:
- Statsig doesn't bill you for duplicate checks for the same user on the same Feature Gate, Experiment, or Dynamic Config within an hour.
- Statsig doesn't bill you for checks against Features Gates that are disabled.
- Statsig also doesn't bill you for checks for users who are in not participating in an experiment due to the allocation or targeting you have configured.
Statsig records a Custom Event for billing when you log an event using the Statsig SDK (or import from your data warehouse, or ingest from your data collector). Each event may contain multiple unit identifiers and may be used in multiple experiments.
- Statsig bills custom events only once, regardless of the number of experiments in which they are used.

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