Overview of Complex Event Processing

Complex Event Processing (CEP) is the ability to detect, understand and respond to complex patterns of events occurring across the extended enterprise over varying periods of time. 

To fully understand the business advantages offered to a business using CEP it is important to understand what is meant by the term “events” and where they are located within the enterprise.

Events are messages of business intelligence (see Figure 1) that flow between applications within the extended enterprise and the outside world every second of the day. However the full business implications of these events extend to more that primary business function of each event.  By looking at these events in real-time, patterns may be detected that represent risks and opportunities provided that the required responses are initiated and orchestrated in time to exploit this new information.

It is important not to confuse simple event processing with complex event processing. Many existing Enterprise Service Bus and Message Broking systems are designed to enhance simple event processing as shown in Figure 2.

Complex Event Processing requires the detection and correlation of patterns of events followed by the orchestration of the actions you want the business to perform when such patterns are detected – see Figure 3.   This implies that CEP requires an orchestration platform that sits above the Event layer as shown in Figure 4.

A CEP Orchestration platform should have the following capabilities:

• It is required to process at least hundreds of thousands of events per second to detect events of interest

• It is required to maintain causality, this is very important if cause and effect is required to be identified at any time.

• Should be able to apply time dimensions and the must be able to maintain processing context over large time spans of hours, days or months

• Should be able to identify and correlate complex patterns between the events of interest

• Should be able to generate its own events based on detection of a complex event which can then be used to trigger one or more other complex events

• Should be able to orchestrate responses to detected events by co-ordinating many services and applications over a long time period

• Should be able to detect absence of events with a given time window

• Send results of monitoring, detection and responses to dashboards in real-time.

When to use Complex Event Processing
Figure 5 identifies some of the application areas for CEP.  These applications include cross-selling and up-selling, compliance, fraud detection, supply chain optimisation, exceptions processing, SLA Processing, Customer Service and many more.

CEP for SOA Orchestration
As companies open up their monolithic applications by building a SOA layer they very often find that the services they have created are very brittle and often messages to SOA Services do not complete as expected and a large number of alerts and exceptions are generated. 

This effect is often because the original applications were able to maintain a process context which is often not the case when these applications are accessed via a multitude of simple SOA Services.

A solution to this SOA problem to use Complex Event Processing as a SOA orchestration layer to access the Enterprise SOA bus. By using CEP it is possible to orchestrate processes that call services and events from services and non-service events from people, devices, applications, databases and networks across the extended enterprise.

CEP for Real-time Business Integration
Today’s business environment is constantly subject to many mergers and acquisitions.  This places major challenges on IT organisations to integrate and orchestrate business processes running on disparate systems.  The traditional approach to this problem is to undertake a major system redesign and many man-years of modification, testing and deployment.

As an alternative to the traditional complex integration approach, CEP can be used to implement a rapid business systems orchestration layer that sits above the existing systems, taking advantage of the functionality already developed in those systems, and manages the complex Interactions between these systems.

CEP and Model Driven Integration – a new approach to Business Transformation
Vanguard has initiated the approach of combining CEP and Model Driven Integration to enable rapid business transformations and integrations.

In Model Driven Integration a Model (UML) is used to create models of the required access to legacy systems and integration and instead of using the design models to manually drive coding by programmers, the models are executed on a UML virtual machine and are exposed as SOA services to clients.  This leads to a significant reduction in the cost of integrating to legacy applications, such as SAP/R3.

Once web services have been created to integrate with complex legacy applications using MDI, then CEP can be used to detect patterns of events flowing within these legacy application and transform the business into an event-driven real-time enterprise.

Vanguard is partnering with E2E Technologies (a Swiss company) to offer Model Driven Integration (MDI) development and consultancy services. To find out more about Model Driven Integration click on this link.

Vanguard Complex Event Processing Solutions
Vanguard Technologies has formed a strategic partnership with AptSoft Corporation to provide consultancy and application development services based on AptSoft Director. For further information email sales@vanguard-technologies.com