System Events

NATS servers leverage Accounts support and generate events such as:

account connect/disconnect
authentication errors
server shutdown
server stat summary

In addition the server supports a limited number of requests that can be used to query for account connections, server stat summaries, and pinging servers in the cluster.

These events are enabled by configuring system_account and subscribing/requesting using a system account user.

Accounts are used so that subscriptions from your applications, say >, do not receive system events and vice versa. Using accounts requires either:

Configuring authentication locally and listing one of the accounts in system_account
Or by using decentralized authentication and authorization via jwt as shown in this Tutorial. In this case system_account contains the account public key.

Available Events and Services

The system account publishes messages under well known subject patterns.

Server initiated events:

$SYS.ACCOUNT.<id>.CONNECT (client connects)
$SYS.ACCOUNT.<id>.DISCONNECT (client disconnects)
$SYS.SERVER.ACCOUNT.<id>.CONNS (connections for an account changed)
$SYS.SERVER.<id>.CLIENT.AUTH.ERR (authentication error)
$SYS.ACCOUNT.<id>.LEAFNODE.CONNECT (leaf node connnects)
$SYS.ACCOUNT.<id>.LEAFNODE.DISCONNECT (leaf node disconnects)
$SYS.SERVER.<id>.STATSZ (stats summary)

In addition other tools with system account privileges, can initiate requests (Examples can be found here):

$SYS.REQ.SERVER.<id>.STATSZ (request server stat summary)
$SYS.REQ.SERVER.PING (discover servers - will return multiple messages)

Monitoring endpoints as listed in the table below are accessible as system services using the following subject pattern:

$SYS.REQ.SERVER.<id>.<endpoint-name> (request server monitoring endpoint corresponding to endpoint name.)
$SYS.REQ.SERVER.PING.<endpoint-name> (from all server request server monitoring endpoint corresponding to endpoint name - will return multiple messages)

Endpoint	Endpoint Name
General Server Information	`VARZ`
Connections	`CONNZ`
Routing	`ROUTEZ`
Gateways	`GATEWAYZ`
Leaf Nodes	`LEAFZ`
Subscription Routing	`SUBSZ`

Servers like nats-account-server publish system account messages when a claim is updated, the nats-server listens for them, and updates its account information accordingly:

$SYS.ACCOUNT.<id>.CLAIMS.UPDATE

With these few messages you can build useful monitoring tools:

health/load of your servers
client connects/disconnects
account connections
authentication errors

Local Configuration

To make use of System events, just using accounts, your configuration can look like this:

accounts: {
    USERS: {
        users: [
            {user: a, password: a}
        ]
    },
    SYS: { 
        users: [
            {user: admin, password: changeit}
           ]
    },
}
system_account: SYS

Please note that applications now have to authenticate such that a connection can be associated with an account. In this example username and password were chosen for simplicity of the demonstration. Subscribe to all system events like this nats-sub -s nats://admin:changeit@localhost:4222 ">" and observe what happens when you do something like nats-pub -s "nats://a:a@localhost:4222" foo bar. Examples on how to use system services can be found here.