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 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.
An event processing architecture is based on interactions between three components: an event source, an event processor, and an event consumer.
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.
The event processing system can perform various actions on events:
The processed event is then available to an 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:
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.