The present approach relates to the use of a unique key for event messages related to the same event and by employing a publication/subscription framework so that like-keyed event messages are only processed by a subscribing server. The message key may be a numeric value (e.g., from 0-99) calculated or generated based on designated event fields so that similar message keys will have the same message key number. The message key may be used to populate an event bucket field and may also be used as the topic of an event message, allowing a subscribing server to subscribe to this message key and receive and process the related event messages in order of arrival. In this manner, there is no distribution of the event messages having the same message key between parallel processing servers.