How does the HEC work?

HTTP and HTTPS events created by web applications contain event metadata, such as time, host, source, source type, and index, as well as other event data, found in curly brackets following the event key. The HEC makes it easy for app developers to add a minimal amount of code in order to send this data, so it's valuable for operational decision making, directly from their apps to Splunk. This is all done in a secure and efficient way, making it easy for apps to be able to Splunk their data.

Typically, an application generates its own log file or uses Document Object Model (DOM) tagging to generate some relevant functional metrics. This is useful and still applicable to traditional multi-page web applications. But web page development has leapt forward in recent years with a new framework called Single Page Application (SPA). The advance of SPA means that most of an application's work in showing HTML results now happens dynamically in the client's browser. Instead of...