IBM BPM, V8.0.1, All platforms > Authoring services in Integration Designer > Monitoring events > Monitoring events
Event generation and monitoring
In IBM Integration Designer, you can enable 6.0.2 event generation or 7.0 monitor model generation for many of the business integration components produced by the editing tools, such as business processes and business rules. The primary tool for enabling event generation and monitoring in IBM Integration Designer is the event monitor.
In any editor where the event monitor resides, you can select one or more monitorable component elements and then use the event monitor to choose the events that you want to generate and monitor for the selected elements.
For example, in the business process editor, you could select a Receive activity in a business process and then use the event monitor to choose the Activity Started and Activity Stopped events for generation and monitoring. A complete list of monitorable components and elements is found in the topic "Monitorable components and elements in IBM Integration Designer."
Before you work with the event monitor, you should have a basic understanding of the following event-related concepts:
- Common Event Infrastructure
- Common Base Event
- Business events
These concepts are discussed in the following sections.
Common Event Infrastructure
In IBM Integration Designer and IBM BPM, the Common Event Infrastructure (CEI) is used to provide basic event management services, such as event generation, transmission, persistence, and consumption. CEI was developed to address industry-wide problems in exchanging events between incompatible systems, many of which employed different event infrastructures, event formats, and data stores. Using CEI, previously incompatible systems are now capable of sharing a single infrastructure and using a single API, which facilitates data exchange between applications written by the same vendors or different vendors.
Common Base Event
Although CEI provides an infrastructure for event management, it does not define the format of events. This is defined by the Common Base Event specification, which provides a standard XML-based format for business events, system events, and performance information. Application developers and administrators can use the Common Base Event specification for structuring and developing event types.
The key concept in the Common Base Event model is the situation, which is any occurrence that happens anywhere in the computing system, such as a user login or a scheduled server shutdown. The Common Base Event model defines a set of standard situation types, such as StartSituation and CreateSituation, that accommodate most of the situations that might arise.
In the Common Base Event model, an event is a structured notification that reports information related to a situation. An event reports three kinds of information:
- The situation that has occurred
- The identity of the affected component
- The identity of the component that is reporting the situation, which might be the same as the affected component.
The Common Base Event specification is part of the IBM Autonomic Computing Toolkit.
Business events
Business events capture information that is relevant to a business. This information can then be analyzed to evaluate whether different aspects of the business are effective.
For example, a business event could reveal when the number of customer orders for a business product falls below a critical level in a specific time frame.
In IBM Integration Designer, a set of predefined business events is provided for each type of monitorable component, such as business processes, business rules, and other components. This means that you have a full set of business events at your command without necessarily needing to write a single line of event code. The predefined business events are all based on the Common Base Event specification and you can use the event monitor to select them for generation.
In all of the IBM Integration Designer editors that support event monitoring, any events that you select are by default generated in accordance with the Common Base Event specification and are transmitted over CEI and logged in the CEI data store.
However, in the business process editor and the human task editor, there are CEI and Audit Log check boxes that enable you to choose where to log the generated events. If you select the CEI check box, business events relating to business processes and inline and stand-alone human tasks will be generated into the CEI data store.
If you select the Audit Log check box, the same business events will also be generated as audit events in the process choreographer database.
It is important to note that unlike audit events that are logged in the process choreographer database, CEI events are generally accessible to all components and event consumers. For this reason, unless you have a specific need to work with audit events, it is recommended that you enable the generation and monitoring of CEI events rather than audit events.