An in-depth look into the concept of global and location-based events and an announcement of changes where all global events will begin routing to the IBM Frankfurt location on May 21, 2019.
Last month, IBM announced the availability of Activity Tracker with LogDNA, enabling users to receive aggregated events from subscribed IBM Cloud services. In the announcement, the topic of global events was introduced, and since the announcement, the service is available now in Frankfurt, Germany.
Global and location-based events
Location-based activity events are generated by IBM Cloud services hosted within an IBM data center location, like Dallas or Frankfurt. When clients and applications interact with cloud services hosted within that location, location-based cloud activity events are captured and made available to the Activity Tracker with LogDNA instance configured in that location. Location-based events maintain data locality to the services running in that cloud location.
For example, if you provision the Certificate Manager cloud service in the Frankfurt location, events from that instance will be sent to the Frankfurt instance of Activity Tracker with LogDNA. If you provision Certificate Manager in the Dallas location, events from that instance will be sent to the Dallas instance of Activity Tracker with LogDNA. In both cases, events are kept local to the region and location of the subscribed Cloud Service.
Global events are different. Global events are events that relate to data/resources that are generally synchronized across all regions. In our two examples below, the services that users interact with are integrated into the core of the global IBM Cloud experience.
- When an account administrator invites users to join the account, they can do it from any location in the Cloud. They might invite a user that is located in Frankfurt and grant them permissions to work with a service that is provisioned in Dallas. Where should the event go? The answer is a global domain that is agnostic of origin or location and where the information is synchronized across all regions.
- Resource Controller events are also considered global events in IBM Cloud. These events report provisioning and deletion of service instances across the Cloud. Although a service instance is created in a specific location, Resource Controller actions are reported as global events to offer a single view of all the service instances that are provisioned across the account.
The common theme for global events is a single, synchronized location where account administrators can monitor certain types of activity across the Cloud. Meanwhile, location-based events remain local to the location where subscribed cloud service is hosted.
Events and global locality
Global events present a dilemma for where they are published. Locality implies they are published to a region or location, however, global events can span multiple data centers. A global approach to location is required.
Activity Tracker with LogDNA recently announced service availability in Frankfurt, and soon, Activity Tracker with LogDNA will also support EU-managed operations. Based on this upcoming support, the service is now beginning to consolidate all global events to the Frankfurt data center location.
Do I need to do anything?
Capturing global events in Frankfurt will require an Activity Tracker with LogDNA instance in that location if you do not already have one. Beginning the effective date, IAM events previously sending to Dallas will send to Frankfurt. Events previously collected in Dallas will remain in Activity Tracker with LogDNA search for the subscribed period of time.
Collected events can also be archived to your defined Cloud Object Storage location located in the region of your choice.
Grow your cloud observability today
The number of data center hosting locations for Activity Tracker with LogDNA and the number of IBM Cloud services are both growing to provide greater visibility to your cloud activities. Activity Tracker with LogDNA can be found in the IBM Cloud Catalog under the Developer Tools category. Alternatively, you may access the service through the Observability menu.