Can I alert when the value of a field changes?

[matt]

I've got an application that logs status events. The values in these events generally will not change. Is there a search that will tell me if the value a given field changed from one value (foo=bar) to another (foo=baz)? Kinda like fschange for events

[gkanapathy · Accepted solution]

I would alert on the search (over all time):

sourcetype=mystatusevents foo=* | head 2 | dedup consecutive=true foo

and alert if the number of results is more than 1. If you need to be alerted, you should schedule to search to run more frequently than these status events get logged, or you can increase the "head" parameter, e.g., if you make it "| head 20" you need to run the search more frequently than it takes for 19 events to be logged.