Once you start receiving many events, your feed gets dense quickly.

Use category to group events by workflow or system area.

In Operational, categories show up in the left sidebar and filter dropdown, so your team can jump into slices like billing, cron, error, or ai without scanning everything.

Example 1: Billing incidents

await ops.events.log({
  name: "payment retry failed",
  avatar: "💳",
  category: "billing",
  content: "Stripe retry failed for inv_2044",
});

Example 2: Scheduled jobs

await ops.events.log({
  name: "nightly product sync finished",
  avatar: "🕒",
  category: "cron",
  type: "rows",
  content: [
    { label: "Imported", content: 1284 },
    { label: "Failed", content: 17 }
  ]
});

Example 3: System failures

await ops.events.log({
  name: "ingestion timeout",
  avatar: "🚨",
  category: "error",
  content: "queue ingestion timed out after 15s",
});

Search tips

Use search with categories to narrow large timelines fast.

1. First click a category like billing.
2. Then search for a keyword like retry or invoice.
3. Add another exact identifier from content (for example inv_2044) to get a small, actionable result set.

This is especially useful when one project has thousands of mixed events per day.

Category conventions that scale

1. Keep names short and predictable (billing, error, cron, tracker).
2. Use name for action and category for grouping.
3. Keep category length under 24 characters.
4. Avoid one-off random categories, or your sidebar becomes noisy.