Events

Overview

Whenever changes occur in your ngrok account or when traffic transits through your endpoints, an event is fired. You may subscribe to these events, filter them to those relevant to you and publish them to any number of destinations.

ngrok's event system was designed for three primary use cases:

Sending logs of your ngrok traffic to logging services like Datadog and CloudWatch Logs
Sending audit logs of ngrok configurations changes to your SIEM
Enabling you to programmatically respond to events on your ngrok account

There are over 40 event types published via ngrok at the time of writing. They break down into two important classes of event:

Configuration Events: Changes to your account like create/update/delete of Domains, API Keys, IP Policies, etc.
Traffic Events: When traffic transits through your endpoints like processing an HTTP request or TCP connection

Definitions

ngrok's event logging system is composed of three simple primitives. You create an Event Subscription to subscribe to a set of Event Sources and publish those events to one or more Event Destinations.

Event Subscriptions: Define which Event Sources to capture and which Event Destinations to publish to.
Event Sources: The event types a subscription captures and optionally a set of fields to record and a boolean filter expression
Event Destintations: Where events are sent, e.g. Datadog, CloudWatch, Kinesis.

Quickstart

You can create your first Event Subscription on the Events page of your ngrok Dashboard to being capturing and publishing events.

We also publish guides to get started with each of ngrok's Event Destinations:

Event Subscriptions

Event subscriptions define which Event Sources to capture and which destinations to publish to. If you're familiar with other event systems, they may call this a listener, a hook, a probe or a tap.

When you create an Event Subscription, you select:

One or more Event Sources to subscribe to
One or more Event Destinations to publish the subscribed events to

Event Subscriptions can be created on the ngrok Dashboard or via the Event Subscription API Resource.

Event Sources

Event Sources choose which events an Event Subscription captures. Other event systems may call this a selector.

There are two categories of event sources.

Configuration Events: Changes to your account like create/update/delete of Domains, API Keys, IP Policies, etc.
Traffic Events: When traffic transits through your endpoints like processing an HTTP request or TCP connection

Traffic Events support the ability to select exactly which fields you'd like to include in the captured event. This provides you with control over how much data is logged to the destinations.

Traffic Events also support the ability to be filtered. As part of the Event Source definition you specify a CEL expression which is evaluated against each event to determine if it should be captured. See the Filters section for further detail.

The ngrok Event Sources reference documents the full list of Event Sources and their fields.

Versioning and Payload Stability

Event Sources include a version number in their name. Each Event Source ends with a version string after a dot, e.g. api_key_created.v0.

New fields may be added to the payloads of an Event Source without a version change. Any other change to the event representation will lead to the introduction of a new version of the Event Source.

Filters

You may specify a filter on the Event Sources of Traffic Events. Filters are a boolean expression defined in Google's Common Expression Language (CEL). Filters are evaluated on each event as it is published to determine whether it should be sent to the Event Subscription's destinations.

Traffic Events are often high cardinality. We support filters because you may only interested in logging a subset of traffic (e.g. specific client IPs). Filters also enable you to control spend on downstream destinations where you incur costs based on the quantity of data processed and stored.

The event object is made available to the CEL filter expression as the ev variable. ev corresponds to the object field of the captured event. Use standard JSONPath syntax to access the fields of the event you want to use in your filters.

Filter expressions have the following limitations:

Only some fields of an event are available in the ev object. The Event Source's reference documentation will specify whether a field may be evaluated in a filter expression.
Event metadata fields like principal or event_timestamp are not available

Filter Examples

Filter for connections from a particular hostname

ev.conn.server_name.matches("ngrok-docs-examples\\.ngrok\\.dev")

Filter for connections to an endpoint that didn't use HTTPS

ev.conn.server_name.matches(".*-your-org\\.ngrok\\.dev") &&
ev.conn.server_port == 80

Filter for connections to a hostname that exclude traffic from a client IP

ev.conn.client_ip != "2601:0:8200:0:4cd7:fd52:0:7823" &&
ev.conn.server_name == "ngrok-docs-examples.ngrok.dev"

Event Destinations

An Event Destination encapsulates the configuration to publish events to other systems. Other event systems may call this a sink.

Event Destinations are typically third-party logging aggregators. The following destinations are currently supported:

Each destination requires provider-specific configuration. If you create a destination in the ngrok dashboard, you'll be prompted to send a test event to verify the integration.

When configuring AWS destinations you'll be prompted to optionally download a small helper script which will automatically configure the appropriate IAM objects necessary for integration. You may also set these values up via the AWS Console or tools like Terraform or Pulumi.

AWS S3 is not a directly supported destination. Instead, configure AWS Kinesis Firehose to deliver events into an S3 bucket.

Event Payloads

Events are serialized as JSON when they are published to a destination.

Events include the following fields:

Name	Description	Example
`account_id`	unique identifier for the account, always prefixed with ac_	`ac_2OtNvAlhso10Gx6s7eupzX3F98q`
`event_id`	unique identifier for this event, always prefixed with ev_	`ev_1vPlyBW3OR44bpPphS4HIZyajDD`
`event_type`	identifies the object, action, and version of the event	`ip_policy_created.v0`
`event_timestamp`	timestamp of when the event fired in RFC 3339 format	`2021-07-16T21:44:37Z`
`object`	the event object	See examples below
`principal`	an object of the principal who actioned this event, null for traffic events	See example below

The object property of the event is distinct for each Event Source.

For Configuration Events, the object representation is identical to its API resource at the time of capture.

Traffic Events define their own object representation because they have no corresponding API resource definition.

Principal Object

The principal object in every event describe the user or bot user responsible for initiating the event. Principal is defined for all Configuration Events and it is null for Traffic Events.

Name	Description	Example
id	unique identifier for the principal, either a user or bot	`usr_2OtNv9qH5Nk4NuNeszZ39gBxZ4H`
subject	human readable unique identifier for the principal, either a user email or a bot user name	`foo@example.com`
source	where the principal initiated the event, either 'Dashboard' or 'API'	`API`
credential	id and uri resource for the credential used for authentication, `null` if `source` is 'Dashboard'	`{"id": "ak_2Oxt94wYsBTLwFUoMZcJRvJTaub","uri": "https://api.ngrok.com/api_keys/ak_2Oxt94wYsBTLwFUoMZcJRvJTaub"}`

Example Payloads

ip_policy_created.v0 event

{
    "event_id": "ev_25X2AsJ5xpvuOParTYUQWe12XKo",
    "event_type": "ip_policy_created.v0",
    "event_timestamp": "2022-02-23T23:29:29Z",
    "account_id": "ac_2OtNvAlhso10Gx6s7eupzX3F98q",
    "principal": {
        "id": "usr_2OtNv9qH5Nk4NuNeszZ39gBxZ4H",
        "subject": "foo@example.com",
        "source": "API",
        "credential": {
            "id": "ak_2Oxt94wYsBTLwFUoMZcJRvJTaub",
            "uri": "https://api.ngrok.com/api_keys/ak_2Oxt94wYsBTLwFUoMZcJRvJTaub"
        }
    },
    "object": {
        "id": "ipp_25X2Ao39z73FlVQKZ1iReMPe6Qv",
        "uri": "https://api.ngrok.com/ip_policies/ipp_25X2Ao39z73FlVQKZ1iReMPe6Qv",
        "created_at": "2022-02-23T23:29:29Z",
        "description": "Home network IP",
        "metadata": "",
        "action": "allow"
    }
}

http_request_complete.v0 event

{
    "event_id": "ev_25X3yFS6TDkig1KDJWIc4nnJO0c",
    "event_type": "http_request_complete.v0",
    "event_timestamp": "2022-02-23T23:44:16Z",
    "account_id": "ac_2OtNvAlhso10Gx6s7eupzX3F98q",
    "object": {
        "conn": {
            "client_ip": "2601:0:8200:9e:4cd7:0:c97f:7823",
            "server_name": "ngrok-docs-example.ngrok.io",
            "server_port": ""
        },
        "http": {
            "request": {
                "first_byte_ts": null,
                "last_byte_ts": null,
                "method": "GET",
                "url": {
                    "path": "/docs/events"
                },
                "version": "HTTP/2.0"
            },
            "response": {
                "body_length": 13079,
                "first_byte_ts": "2022-02-23T23:44:16.732791273Z",
                "last_byte_ts": "2022-02-23T23:44:16.737257209Z",
                "status_code": 200
            }
        }
    }
}

tcp_connection_closed.v0 event

{
    "event_id": "ev_25X4osod1q306srserDeFyghTC4",
    "event_type": "tcp_connection_closed.v0",
    "event_timestamp": "2022-02-23T23:51:14Z",
    "account_id": "ac_2OtNvAlhso10Gx6s7eupzX3F98q",
    "object": {
        "conn": {
            "bytes_in": 3437,
            "bytes_out": 90256,
            "client_ip": "2601:0:8200:9e:4cd7:0:c97f:7823",
            "end_ts": "2022-02-23T23:51:14.005372199Z",
            "server_name": "ngrok-docs-example.ngrok.io",
            "server_port": "",
            "start_ts": "2022-02-23T23:44:16.528374173Z"
        }
    }
}

Licensing

The ngrok Events system is available to all ngrok users with a free tier that includes the transmission of up to 10,000 events per month.

Events

Overview​

Definitions​

Quickstart​

Event Subscriptions​

Event Sources​

Versioning and Payload Stability​

Filters​

Filter Examples​

Filter for connections from a particular hostname​

Filter for connections to an endpoint that didn't use HTTPS​

Filter for connections to a hostname that exclude traffic from a client IP​

Event Destinations​

Event Payloads​

Principal Object​

Example Payloads​

ip_policy_created.v0 event​

http_request_complete.v0 event​

tcp_connection_closed.v0 event​

Licensing​