Summary Identification of disturbances that pushes the power system towards insecure limits can assist in timely remedial measures to be taken for improving situation awareness. The information about event's signature is primarily available in the form of frequency or voltage signals obtained from phasor measurements units (PMUs) in real‐time. Proper evaluation of power system event characteristics enhances the situational awareness and assists system operator to develop required corrective measures for secure operations. In this paper, a fast and accurate algorithm is proposed to identify, classify and locate the events using minimum synchronized data for enhancing the situational awareness of the system. An index is developed with short window synchronized bus frequency data of 18 cycles to detect an event in the network. For identifying the type of event, the same data length bus voltage magnitude and frequency synchronized measurements are utilized to develop statistical measures based novel indices. A rule‐based inference from event's signature is also developed to validate the usefulness of indices for classification and location identification of the event. These extracted statistical indices are applied as input to the Random Forest Classifier to classify and locate the events in real‐time. The proposed approach captures real‐time synchronized data and is adaptive to system topological changes. The proposed comprehensive approach for situational awareness is applied to standard IEEE 39 Bus test system and IEEE 118 Bus test system. The results highlight the performance of the composite method for event identification, classification and location identification with less computational burden and high accuracy. Innovative indices calculated from PMU measurements from all buses (frequency and voltage) identify events, its type & location within “half second” including communication delay of event occurrence. The efficacy of proposed method is established through test on standard IEEE‐39 New England test system and IEEE 118 bus test system.