Calculating PutEvents Event Entry Sizes

Note Amazon EventBridge is the preferred way to manage your events. CloudWatch Events and EventBridge are the same underlying service and API, but EventBridge provides more features. Changes you make in either CloudWatch or EventBridge will appear in each console. For more information, see Amazon EventBridge.

You can inject custom events into CloudWatch Events using the PutEvents action. You can inject multiple events using the PutEvents action as long as the total entry size is less than 256KB. You can calculate the event entry size beforehand by following the steps below. You can then batch multiple event entries into one request for efficiency.

Note

The size restriction is imposed on the entry. Even if the entry is less than the size restriction, it does not mean that the event in CloudWatch Events is also less than this size. On the contrary, the event size is always larger than the entry size due to the necessary characters and keys of the JSON representation of the event. For more information, see Event Patterns in CloudWatch Events.

The PutEventsRequestEntry size is calculated as follows:

• If the Time parameter is specified, it is measured as 14 bytes.

• The Source and DetailType parameters are measured as the number of bytes for their UTF-8 encoded forms.

• If the Detail parameter is specified, it is measured as the number of bytes for its UTF-8 encoded form.

• If the Resources parameter is specified, each entry is measured as the number of bytes for their UTF-8 encoded forms.

The following example Java code calculates the size of a given PutEventsRequestEntry object:

int getSize(PutEventsRequestEntry entry) {
    int size = 0;
    if (entry.getTime() != null) {
        size += 14;
    }
    size += entry.getSource().getBytes(StandardCharsets.UTF_8).length;
    size += entry.getDetailType().getBytes(StandardCharsets.UTF_8).length;
    if (entry.getDetail() != null) {
        size += entry.getDetail().getBytes(StandardCharsets.UTF_8).length;
    }
    if (entry.getResources() != null) {
        for (String resource : entry.getResources()) {
            if (resource != null) {
                size += resource.getBytes(StandardCharsets.UTF_8).length;
            }
        }
    }
    return size;
}