Migrating From History To Stream

Box recommends that applications subscribing to live events through admin_logs migrate to admin_logs_streaming. admin_logs_streaming provides lower and more consistent latency, as well as ensures that late arriving events will not be missed. Events can be deduplicated between admin_logs and admin_logs_streaming by their event IDs.

Enterprise stream_type comparison

Benefits of admins_logs_streaming

• Ensures late arriving events are not missed by your subscribing application
• Provides 80% lower latency (during normal operations)
• Has much more consistent latency (during normal operations)
• Recovers much more gracefully from a fault, because your service no longer has to manage backfilling late events

Differences between admin_logs and admin_logs_streaming

• Provides two weeks of event history (i.e. retention)
• Does not support the created_after and created_before filter parameters
• May contain duplicates (provides an 'at least once' guarantee)
• No longer returns events in chronological order (events are returned in roughly the order they are processed)

Similarities between admin_logs and admin_logs_streaming

• Shares the same GET /events API endpoint
• Returns the same events payload (events can be deduplicated across the two stream types by event ID)
• Enables filtering by event_type
• Allows paginating through events via a stream_position

How to migrate from admin_logs to admin_logs_streaming

1. Existing requests will look something like the below

curl https://api.box.com/2.0/events?stream_type=admin_logs&stream_position=1632893855 \
  -H "authorization: Bearer <ACCESS_TOKEN>"

2. Begin overlapping existing requests with admin_logs_streaming

• Start two weeks ago and backfill:

curl https://api.box.com/2.0/events?stream_type=admin_logs_streaming&stream_position=0 \
  -H "authorization: Bearer <ACCESS_TOKEN>"

or

• Start now and run in parallel:

curl https://api.box.com/2.0/events?stream_type=admin_logs_streaming&stream_position=now \
  -H "authorization: Bearer <ACCESS_TOKEN>"

3. Paginate through results until now and deduplicate with admin_logs events

curl https://api.box.com/2.0/events?stream_type=admin_logs_streaming&stream_position=1632893855 \
  -H "authorization: Bearer <ACCESS_TOKEN>"

4. Continue to overlap until confident

5. Turn off old admin_logs requests