Fixed-format event emission

Event emission from IBM business automation products rely on fixed format.

Event formats

Fixed format

Business Automation Insights is designed to recognize, ingest, and process events from the IBM Business Automation Workflow, Operational Decision Manager, and IBM FileNet® Content Manager components of the IBM Cloud Pak® for Business Automation platform. Such events are sent in a fixed format. See examples and documentation in Reference for event emission. Users who install both Business Automation Insights and one or more of those platform components must parameterize the component to emit events, and configure and secure event emitters.

For more information about event emitters on a Kubernetes platform, see Configuring event emitters and Securing communications to Kafka.

Event types

IBM Business Automation Insights ingests fixed-format events as raw events and processes them to time series and summaries.
Raw events
Raw events are the native business events that can be ingested and processed in IBM Business Automation Insights. Each Apache Flink job processes only bpmn, bawadv, icm, odm, ads, and content raw events from applications that support event emitters for producing time series events, or summaries, or both. Other events that might reach the processing Apache Flink job are dropped.

To learn how each event type is associated with its Flink job, see Table 1.

Time series
Time series are simplified, flattened versions of raw events. Only raw events are aggregated into time series. (Business data can contain nested objects). For time series to be used for visualization through dashboards, time series events are stored in OpenSearch indices through the write alias, with a unique document identifier.

IBM Operational Decision Manager and IBM FileNet Content Manager emit only time series.

Summaries
Summaries are aggregations of time series. For example, each process instance, each activity instance, and each case instance has a summary entity. Summaries describe the current state of the process, activity, or case instance, and so on, and compute their duration so far. As soon as events are consumed, OpenSearch serves as immediate storage for active summaries and time series.
  • Active summaries reflect events that are not completed and will therefore continue to be updated. Active summaries are stored in OpenSearch through the active-write alias with a unique document identifier from active to complete event flow.
  • Summaries are completed when the process, activity, or case, and so on, is completed. Completed summaries reflect events in their final form. Completed summaries are stored in OpenSearch through the completed-write alias, with a unique document identifier from an active to complete event flow. At the same time, completed summaries are removed from the active-write alias index.
IBM Operational Decision Manager, and IBM FileNet Content Manager do not emit summaries.

Flink jobs for event types

IBM Business Automation Insights currently supports bpmn, bawadv, icm, odm, ads, icn and content event types. From the source application, event emitters send events toward a Kafka topic, where they are consumed by a dedicated Flink job. These Flink jobs build the resulting time series events and summaries.
Table 1. Flink jobs for event types
Cloud Pak application Event type Flink job name Emitter format Kubernetes job name Event format
IBM Business Automation Workflow bpmn bai-bpmn Reference for BPMN events <ICPBA custom resource>-bai-bpmn BPMN event formats
IBM Business Automation Workflow bawadv bai-bawadv Reference for BPEL events <ICPBA custom resource>-bai-bawadv BPEL event formats
IBM Business Automation Workflow icm bai-icm Reference for Case events <ICPBA custom resource>-bai-icm Case event formats
Operational Decision Manager odm bai-odm Reference for Operational Decision Manager decisions events and Configuring the ODM event emitter <ICPBA custom resource>-bai-odm Reference for Operational Decision Manager decisions events
IBM FileNet Content Manager content and navigator bai-content and bai-navigator Reference for Content events <ICPBA custom resource>-bai-content and <ICPBA custom resource>-bai-navigator Reference for Content events
IBM Automation Decision Services ads bai-ads Business Automation Insights reference <ICPBA custom resource>-bai-ads See the Event data as JSON object section in Emitting decision execution events