The Common Base Event in WebSphere Application Server

This topic describes how WAS takes advantage of the Common Base Events.

An application creates an event object whenever something happens that either should be recorded for later analysis or which may require additional work to be triggered. 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 application creating the event object is called the event source. Event sources can use a common structure for the event. The accepted standard for such a structure is called the Common Base Event. The Common Base Event is a XML document defined as part of the Autonomic Computing initiative. The Common Base Event defines common fields, the values they can take and the exact meanings of these values.

The Common Base Event model is a standard defining 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. For more information about the Common Base Event model, see the Common Base Event specification (Canonical Situation Data Format: The Common Base Event V1.0.1). The 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).

The Common Base Event should contain all of the information needed by the consumers to understand the event. This includes information about the runtime environment, the business environment and the instance of the application object that created the event.

For complete details on the Common Base Event format, see the XML schema included in the Common Base Event specification document, at ftp://www6.software.ibm.com/software/developer/library/ac-toolkitdg.pdf .

 

See also

Types of problem determination events
The structure of the Common Base Event
Sample Common Base Event instance
Sample Common Base Event template
Component Identification for Problem Determination
Logging Common Base Events in WebSphere Application Server

 

Related Tasks

Using the showlog command to view Common Base Events

 

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