What is event processing?

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.

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:

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:

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.