 | Level: Intermediate Contributors: IBM 10 Mar 2006 A growing number of IBM foundation products and Business Partner applications are adopting the Common Base Event (CBE) format to leverage the IBM Common Event Infrastructure (CEI), a set of modular event-processing components that are designed to simplify event management. By providing a standard, consistent format for the creation and sharing of a wide range of events, the CBE works with CEI to provide any application that uses it with the ability to consolidate event information to quickly and efficiently communicate what is occurring in end-users’ businesses.
An event represents any activity that companies want to track, such as instances in which a negative customer call is received or episodes in which a particular server’s performance drops below a critical threshold. The CBE specification provides a common structure for describing events, while CEI acts as an events bus that collects events and forwards them to the appropriate applications for action. Together, they enable disparate systems and applications to generate and distribute consistent event information, making it easier for companies to correlate events from different components and share the information about their business operations and systems’ performance with decision makers and system administrators. Dashboards, workplaces or reports can be updated in real time with consolidated event information from any number of sources, allowing business leaders to see the status of the business as it changes and helping them to make informed decisions.
Use of CEI and the CBE specification within the components that are part of a company’s IT system can help the company quickly understand and resolve a myriad of business, operational and IT-related issues. For example, it can:
- alert a procurement manager about instances of delayed shipments from vendors.
- keep a marketing manager informed about the real-time effects of a new marketing campaign on sales.
- correlate data from a variety of systems to help an IT team troubleshoot problems associated with a critical e-business application.
Built into several IBM WebSphere® software products, CEI supports the transmission, distribution, persistence, subscription, updating and querying of events. This event bus acts as a highway for events, so that when an event is triggered, it is communicated to the end user who needs to see it regardless of the application from which it was emitted or which application needs to consume it. Seamless interoperability across CEI is enabled by the CBE specification, which provides a consistent format for describing events. Together, CEI and the CBE specification speed the communication of events, enabling end users to quickly get the information they need to make timely decisions and take action.
The benefits of adopting CEI and the CBE specification
CEI event management enabled by the CBE specification allows the sharing of reliable event data throughout a system that comprises disparate applications and components — giving a company access to the information it needs to understand its business as a whole and get to the root of specific activities. IBM delivers CEI in several products, including IBM WebSphere Process Server, IBM WebSphere Server Foundation and IBM Enterprise Server Bus. Additionally, more than 50 IBM Business Partners have adopted the CBE specification, and are now able to leverage CEI to simplify the management of events consumed or emitted by their products.
By joining this community of CBE specification adopters, you can:
- Help strengthen your products by augmenting their integration with IBM foundation products that use CEI and the CBE specification, as well as products provided by other vendors that have adopted the format.
- Benefit from the work IBM has done to develop CEI and the CBE specification, and deploy a single, reliable event management format across all your products.
- Increase customer satisfaction rates by helping your customers simplify the management of their complex systems.
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