---
title: "Understanding sessions and events in Sitecore Personalize"
slug: "understanding-sessions-and-events-in-sitecore-personalize"
abstract: "Provides a business overview of how Sitecore Personalize uses sessions and events (Sitecore Personalize)."
---
# Understanding sessions and events in Sitecore Personalize

This is a useful topic to familiarize yourself with if you are marketer or business user and want an overview of how Sitecore Personalize processes behavioral data.

Sitecore Personalize can process a guest's behavioral data, such as when a guest clicked a button, viewed a webpage, or added an item to their cart. Each instance of behavioral data is an event.

Your organization can capture and asynchronously send events in real-time to Sitecore Personalize using the [Stream API](https://doc.sitecore.com/personalize/en/developers/api/index-en.html?contextId=nfllD3). Sitecore Personalize groups events together that occur on a specific channel during a set period of time. The process of grouping events into sessions is called *sessionization* and varies per channel.

You can then use session and event data in decisioning and conditions, although [data retention and duration limits apply](https://doc.sitecore.com/personalize/en/users/sitecore-personalize/using-server-side-javascript-in-sitecore-personalize/understanding-data-limits-in-decisioning-and-conditions.html "Understanding data limits in decisioning and conditions").

Sitecore Personalize uses the following attributes to categorize event sessions:

- Channel
- Point of sale
- Browser ID
- Timestamp

The following is the basic sessionization algorithm:

1. Group events by channel and browser ID and order by time. This creates distinct groups of time-ordered events for each device and channel.
2. Close the session after a certain period of inactivity. This is configured differently by each organization, for each tenant. For example, many organizations set 20 minutes as the amount of inactivity to close a session.