ActiveVOS Designer User’s Guide

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What is Business Event Processing?

Business event processing allows you to find out interesting trends about running or completed BPEL processes. For example, you might want to know, “What is the average time for service X to process an order?” where service X is an invoke activity in your process, and you are evaluating a given number of completed processes over a certain time window.

Another example of a business event to process is, “Alert me if the average time it takes to claim a task exceeds N minutes.” In this case, you can send an alert when a certain business condition is met.

Business event processing, also referred to as CEP (complex event processing), allows you to aggregate real-time data, in time windows if desired, that lets you react in ways that go beyond business logic built into a single BPEL process. Unlike event handling or other process logic, event processing looks at a stream of process instances.

ActiveVOS business event processing is based on Esper, an event stream processing language and engine. As processes execute, Esper creates an event stream, flowing over a time-based window. According to the Esper documentation, “Esper engine provides a higher abstraction and intelligence and can be thought of as a database turned upside-down: instead of storing the data and running queries against stored data, Esper allows applications to store queries and run the data through. Response from the Esper engine is real-time when conditions occur that match user defined queries.”

You can create business event statements and patterns in Designer and deploy them to the server. The statements and patterns apply to one or more BPEL processes. As processes execute, the interesting data you want is retrieved in real-time and can be combined with historical data for reports or triggered actions.

The basic steps required for business event processing are the following:

• Define an event. Refer to Defining An Event in the Process Deployment Descriptor.
• Write an event processing statement and/or pattern
• Deploy the event-based processes
• Create an event action process that should run based on a matching business condition or create a report template to hold the event data
• Deploy event resources, including statements, patterns, report templates, and BPEL processes
• Run the processes that have defined events
• View event-triggered processes or reports in the ActiveVOS Server Console

Some of the benefits of using eventing include:

• Get alerted when certain conditions occur that warrant human intervention
• Monitor processes in action and spot abnormalities
• View reports of historical activity
• Perform quantitative analysis based on the reports
• Perform the analysis of a process that has already completed in order to view the cause of a problem

For a full discussion, see Active Endpoints Esper Reference.

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