Any status changed, threshold crossed, or task completed — basically anything that changes in an IT infrastructure — is an event. Events have been the basic means of communication between infrastructure components and IT administrators since the first machine was put into production. It is the basic mechanism by which alerts and alarms are reported — and the fundamental element from which IT operations personnel reach a decision about the different options for, criticality of, and root cause of a potential incident. This typical interface is the subject of many transformations: as an integration point between management solutions, as a convergence point between different services, and as a decision-support tool rather than a reporting solution for discrete and real-time events.