Enabling and processing events. To enable events, an application model correlated to an application is declaratively defined. The application model describes operations of the application. One or more event models correlated to the application model are declaratively defined. The event models describe application execution locations where events are desired to be emitted in the execution of the application. Based on the correlation of the event models to the application models, the applications are instrumented with instrumentation code to cause the application to emit events at the execution locations. To process events an application model is defined. The application model includes one or more observation models. The observation models include a correlation of events to the observation model by defining instrumentation models in the application model. An event is received. The event is applied to the observation model based on the correlation. The event is processed according to the observation model.