Start of change

What is event processing?

An event is anything that happens that is significant to a system. 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.

Event processing consists of three main steps:

  1. Event sources emit events into the event processing system. Examples of event sources are simple Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) sensors and actuators, business flows, and CICS® applications. The event processing system can perform a variety of actions on events:
    • Simple enriching of the event; for example, adding a timestamp to the event data.
    • Adding information about the source of the event.
    • Processing multiple simple events, from multiple event sources, against event patterns to produce a new derived event. Processing of this kind is often referred to as complex event processing.
    CICS event processing provides filtering, capture, enrichment, formatting, and routing of single business events, enabling CICS to act as a source of single business events.
  2. The event resulting from processing is made available for consumption.
  3. The event consumer reacts to the event. The event consumer might be very simple and just update a database or a visual dashboard with the data carried with the event, or it might carry out new business processing based on the event.
End of change