IBM BPM, V8.0.1, All platforms > Authoring services in Integration Designer > Developing monitor models > What are monitor models? > Monitor details models
Outbound events
Outbound events can be emitted from a monitoring context. They can be received by any event-processing application. They can also be received by the Monitor action services or by Business Monitor.
If the event is received by the Monitor action services, the action services can generate a dashboard alert, send a message by email or pager, or invoke a service. If the event is received by Business Monitor, an outbound event from one monitoring context becomes an inbound event to another monitoring context or to a KPI context.
Each outbound event refers to a particular event definition that defines its structure. Event definitions can be found in XML Schema Definition (.xsd), Common Base Event, or Web Services Description Language (wsdl) files, or a combination. See Common Base Event and XML Schema Definition event definitions and Event parts for more information.
For each outbound event, you must specify at least one trigger that determines when the event will be sent. Based on each trigger that can cause the event to be sent, you specify the values to assign to each event attribute. Expressions are optional for each attribute, but attributes for which no expression is specified will have no content when the event is sent.
Each outbound event can optionally have a filter condition that determines whether it will be sent. When a trigger fires that controls an outbound event, these occurrences take place:
- The associated expression is evaluated, and the event attributes are populated based on the expression.
- The filter condition is evaluated.
- If the filter condition evaluates to true, the outbound event is sent.
Action services events
When an event is received by the Monitor action services in Business Monitor, the action services can generate a dashboard alert, send a message by email or pager, or invoke a web service or Service Component Architecture service. For KPIs, you might find it more convenient to create alerts directly in the dashboards.
For the Monitor action services to receive an event, the event must contain an extended data element of type string named BusinessSituationName with a corresponding value. A default event called ActionServicesEvent is provided in the Monitor action services. The following image shows this event open in the event definition editor:
These outbound events can be used to indicate business situations, such as a printer running out of paper or an ATM running out of cash. Other business situations could be an unacceptable customer response time or a declining sales count that has dropped below a predefined threshold. You set a trigger to detect the business situation and then send an outbound event, for example Sales Count Too Low, that contains relevant information.
For each trigger that can cause the event to be sent, you specify expressions that define some or all of the attributes of the outbound event. You could include a status field set to WARNING or READY, an invoice number, a customer name, or any other kind of information that can be sent in an attribute. The administrator in the Business Monitor dashboards can use the attributes to send the correct alert to the correct people.
For example, if an outbound event is sent when a bill payment is late, the outbound event attributes could contain the ID of the late order, the bill payment date, and the customer information. Business Monitor could be configured to send an email to the customer when this event is received, in addition to displaying an alert in the dashboards.
Other outbound events
Outbound events can also be used for inter-model communication.
For example, if you have a low-level model (such as a model created bottom-up from Business Process Execution Language (BPEL)), and a high-level model (such as a model created in WebSphere Business Modeler), the low-level model can send outbound events that the high-level model receives as inbound events.
You might also want to send an outbound event from a monitoring context to a KPI context.
For example, you might want to send a business situation event if the value of a KPI goes higher than a certain range, but you need to check the KPI value at regular intervals. One way of checking the value is to send an outbound event from the monitoring context to the KPI context. Each time the event arrives, the KPI value is checked against the range.