Event processing overview

An event is anything that happens that is significant to an enterprise. Event processing is the capture, enrichment, formatting and emission of events, the subsequent routing and any further processing of emitted events (sometimes in combination with other events), and the consumption of the processed events.

Events provide a way to notify users or other software products about activities that are occurring in your CICS® applications and systems. If you are planning how to use events, or want more information about event processing in CICS, this section provides a summary of the technologies and concepts to help you get started.

Events can be produced throughout a business enterprise. At the edges of the enterprise, events can be detected by sensors. In the enterprise network, events can be produced when business processes start and complete or fail. The activity of the enterprise and its business can be monitored and changed as a result of events.

Event processing architecture

An event processing architecture is based on interactions between three components: an event source, an event processor, and an event consumer.

Figure 1. Event processing architecture
This diagram shows an event source, an event processor, and an event consumer. In this diagram there are six examples of event source; systems, business processes, sensors, business activity monitoring - BAM, and other which pass events to the event processor for operations to be performed on the events. These events are then passed to the event consumer. The event consumer reacts to events; as alerts, to trigger workflow, or to trigger automated actions.

Event source

An event source emits events into the event processing system. Examples of event sources are simple Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) sensors and actuators, business flows, CICS applications, and CICS system components.

Event processor

The event processing system can perform various actions on events:
  • Enrich a single event in a simple manner; for example, adding a timestamp to the event data. Processing of this kind is sometimes referred to as simple event processing.
  • Add information about the source of the event.
  • Process multiple single events, from multiple event sources against event patterns to produce a new derived or compound event. Processing of this kind is sometimes referred to as complex event processing.

The processed event is then available to an event consumer.

Event consumer

The event consumer reacts to the event. An event consumer can be as simple as updating a database or business dashboard, or as complex as required, carrying out new business processing as a result of the event.

Here are some examples of consuming an event:
  • Updating a business dashboard
  • Updating a database
  • Interacting with Web 2.0 components to dynamically update web pages
  • Sending an alert by using email or SMS based on event data
  • Putting event data on a message queue
  • Starting a new piece of application work

CICS event processing provides filtering, capture, enrichment, formatting, and routing of single business events, enabling CICS to act as a source of simple business events. However, these events can be consumed by a complex event processing engine in which they can be combined with events from other sources in addition to CICS.