IBM BPM, V8.0.1, All platforms > Measuring and improving business processes > Monitoring > Service component monitoring overview > Common Event Infrastructure
Common Base Event model
The Common Base Event model is a standard that defines a common representation of events that is intended for use by enterprise management and business applications. This standard, developed by the IBM Autonomic Computing Architecture Board, supports encoding of logging, tracing, management, and business events using a common XML-based format, making it possible to correlate different types of events that originate from different applications. The Common Base Event model is part of the IBM Autonomic Computing Toolkit.
Common Event Infrastructure currently supports version 1.0.1 of the specification.
The basic concept behind the Common Base Event model is the situation. A situation can be anything that happens anywhere in the computing infrastructure, such as a server shutdown, a disk-drive failure, or a failed user login. The Common Base Event model defines a set of standard situation types that accommodate most of the situations that might arise (for example, StartSituation and CreateSituation).
An event is a structured notification that reports information related to a situation. An event reports three kinds of information:
- The situation itself (what has happened)
- The identity of the affected component (for example, the server that has shut down)
- The identity of the component that is reporting the situation (which might be the same as the affected component)
The Common Base Event specification defines an event as an XML element containing properties that provide all three kinds of information. These properties are encoded as attributes and subelements of the root element, CommonBaseEvent.
The Common Base Event format is extensible. In addition to the standard event properties, an event can also contain extended data elements, which are application-specific elements that can contain any kind of information relevant to the situation. The extensionName attribute labels an event with an optional classification name (an event class), which indicates to applications what sort of extended data elements to expect. The event catalog stores event definitions that describe these event classes and their allowed content.
For complete details on the Common Base Event format, see the specification document and XSD schema included in the IBM Autonomic Computing Toolkit.