Event Processing for Business E-Book

David C. Luckham

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 441

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Find out how Events Processing (EP) works and how it can work for you

Business Event Processing: An Introduction and Strategy Guide thoroughly describes what EP is, how to use it, and how it relates to other popular information technology architectures such as Service Oriented Architecture.

• Explains how sense and response architectures are being applied with tremendous results to businesses throughout the world and shows businesses how they can get started implementing EP
• Shows how to choose business event processing technology to suit your specific business needs and how to keep costs of adopting it down
• Provides practical guidance on how EP is best integrated into an overall IT strategy and how its architectural styles differ from more conventional approaches

This book reveals how to make the most advantageous use of event processing technology to develop real time actionable management information from the events flowing through your company's networks or resulting from your business activities. It explains to managers and executives what it means for a business enterprise to be event-driven, what business event processing technology is, and how to use it.

Leseprobe

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1: Event Processing and the Survival of the Modern Enterprise

Four Basic Questions about Events

What Are Events and Which Ones Are Important?

Why Invest in Event Processing?

Know How Well You’re Doing

Use All Event Sources

Detect When What You Need to Know Happens

Event Processing in Use

The Human Element and Other Sources of Errors

Extract What You Want to Know

Getting Started

Chapter 2: Sixty Years of Event Processing

Event Driven Simulation

Networks

Active Databases

Middleware

The Enterprise Service Bus

Chaos in the Marketing of Information Systems

Service Oriented Architecture

Event Driven Architecture

Summary: Event Processing, 1950–2010

Chapter 3: First Concepts in Event Processing

New Technology Begets New Problems

What Is an Event?

Event Clouds

Levels of Events and Event Analysis

Remark on Standards for Business Events

Event Streams

Processing the Event Cloud

Complex Event Processing and Systems That Use It

Discussion: Immutability of Events

Summary

Chapter 4: The Rise of Commercial Event Processing

The Dawn of Complex Event Processing (CEP)

Four Stages of CEP

Simple CEP (1999–2007)

CEP versus Custom Coding

Creeping CEP (2004–2012)

Business Activity Monitoring

Awareness and Education in Event Processing

Languages for Event Processing

Dashboards and Human-Computer Interfaces

Human-Computer Interfaces

CEP Becomes a Recognized Information Technology (2009–2020)

Event Processing Standards

Ubiquitous CEP

Chapter 5: Markets and Emerging Markets for CEP

Market Areas

Financial Systems, Operations, and Services

Fraud Detection

Transportation

Security and Command and Control

Command and Control for Security

Health Care

Energy

Summary

Chapter 6: Patterns of Events

Events and Event Objects

Overloading Two Meanings

Patterns and Pattern Matching

Single Event Patterns

Processing Patterns by Machine

Patterns of Multiple Events Using Operators

Event Patterns and State

Event Patterns and Time

Causality between Events

Repetitive and Unbounded Behavior

Requirements for an Event Pattern Language

Correctness and Other Questions

Chapter 7: Making Sense of Chaos in Real Time: Part 1

Event Type Spaces

Restricting the Types of Event Inputs May Not Be an Option

The Expanding Input Principle: Always Plan for New Types of Event Inputs and Event Outputs

Architecting Event Processing Strategies

Gross Filters

Prioritization: Split Streaming, Topics, Sentiments, and Other Attributes

Complex Filtering and Prioritization Using Event Patterns

Summary

Chapter 8: Making Sense of Chaos in Real Time: Part 2

Abstract Events and Views

Levels of Abstraction and Views

Organizing Views

Computing Abstractions by Event Pattern Maps

Computable Event Hierarchies

Flexibility of Hierarchy Definitions

Drill Down and Event Analysis

Summary: Dealing with Information Overload

Chapter 9: The Future of Event Processing

Taking Stock

The Evolution of Holistic Event Processing Systems

Crossing Boundaries

The Beginnings of Holistic Event Processing Systems

Future Air Travel Management Systems

Monitoring Human Activities

Pandemic Watch Systems

Monitoring the Consequences

Solving Gridlock in the Metropolis

Monitoring Your Personal Information Footprint

Summary: The Future of Complex Event Processing

Appendix: Glossary of Terminology: The Event Processing Technical Society: (EPTS) Glossary of Terms—Version 2.0

Alphabetical List of Glossary Terms

Glossary of Terms

Glossary According to Lexicographic Order (definitions only)

About the Author

Index

Copyright © 2012 by David Luckham. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

ISBN 978-0-470-53485-4; ISBN 978-1-118-17183-7 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-17184-4 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-17185-1 (ebk)

Preface

This is a book about modern event processing and its current and future applications in business, government, and the Information Society. Modern event processing at the higher levels of business operations and management is a lot different from the kinds of event processing that are the foundations of computer networks and the Internet. The events are different, their significance and importance to various levels of management are different, and there are far fewer standards and a lot more chaos, confusion, and lack of defined terminology.

Business event processing for the right-now business is a 21st-century development, and it is growing fast. It is a technology aimed at enabling an enterprise to take action right now, the instant information becomes available.

One of my motivations in writing this book was to raise the level of awareness of the basic concepts about events and the different ways event processing can be used in business operations. But the field is expanding and changing as different kinds of commercial applications of event processing keep appearing. So the book is really a work in progress about a field of activity that hasn’t finished evolving.

The book was originally intended for people in business who wanted to know if there is anything of value in “event processing” that might be useful to them in running their businesses. But as it turned out, the book can be read by anyone who has some background in information technology (IT), and uses IT in their work. These days, everyone has a cell phone and is busy multitasking, so in fact all of us are using event processing quite heavily, whether we are conscious of it or not.

This is a much smaller book than the one I wrote in 2002. The field of event processing as we now know it didn’t exist then, so the objective of The Power of Events was to lay out the principles of Complex Event Processing (CEP) that had been researched and developed at Stanford under DARPA contracts over the previous ten years. Its other goal was to encourage commercial development—in fact, I tried that myself, but it’s another story!

Today, many businesses plan strategic initiatives under titles such as “Business Analytics and Optimization.” Although they may not know it, CEP is usually a cornerstone of such initiatives. So another of my goals is to give the reader a good idea of the current marketplace for CEP and the kinds of businesses that are applying event processing and CEP in their operations. I have emphasized examples of event processing in use today in different kinds of businesses, including financial systems and services, transportation, security, fraud detection, health care, energy, and other sectors. And I have tried to make the book as nontechnical as I am able to, in writing about this subject.

CEP is fast becoming an enabling technology, hidden under the hood and forgotten except by the cognoscenti of the IT world. And I believe that is, in fact, the long-term future of CEP—to be forgotten just like the TCP/IP network protocols upon which our IT-driven lives depend.

The Power of Events contains a lot of event-processing techniques that have not yet seen commercial application. But I still think, as I did then, that these techniques will become part of commercial applications of event processing in the future. So I have included examples here of the use in business operations of such concepts as causal and timing relations between events and the organization of events into hierarchies.

The final chapter is a personal vision of some of the different roles that event processing technology will play in our information society in the future. This is my pet topic, and the chapter could have been a lot longer. Readers will no doubt think of other applications that are not included here, and indeed I hope they do! In this way, the book may contribute to the further development of event processing.

There are nine chapters. Here’s what’s in them:

Chapter 1: What event processing is and why might it be important to a business

Chapter 2: Four different event processing technologies that have developed over the past sixty years

Chapter 3: Basic concepts of event processing and CEP

Chapter 4: Stages in the development of modern event processing in business and government

Chapter 5: The marketplace for CEP, who’s using event processing, and the kinds of business problems to which it is being applied

Chapter 6: More event processing concepts, such as patterns of multiple events, timing of events, and causality between events (understanding these concepts is important if you’re interested in investing in event processing technology for your business, as they enable you to judge what you’re being sold!)

Chapter 7: Strategies for applying CEP in a business

Chapter 8: Organizing events for different role players in the enterprise

Chapter 9: How the future of event processing and CEP may turn out

There is also an Appendix containing a glossary of event processing terminology.

David Luckham

Palo Alto, California

November 2011

Acknowledgments

I owe thanks to several friends and colleagues who have helped me with various drafts of this book. They gave their time generously to reading, correcting, and commenting on different versions, and alerting me to omissions and new material. Their comments have been influential throughout.

I am happy to thank:

Roy Schulte of Gartner Corp.

John Bates of Progress Software

Leendert Weinhofen of the Norwegian State University

Scott Fingerhut of Informatica, Inc.

Opher Etzion of IBM Research Lab, Haifa, and chairman of the Event Processing Technical Society

They have helped me greatly. Of course, any remaining errors or flaws are entirely of my own making.

I must also thank the Event Processing Technical Society (EPTS) for permission to include the EPTS Glossary of Event Processing Terminology (version 2.0) as an appendix. In an embryonic technology such as CEP, there is a lot of fuzzy undefined talk, especially at trade shows and meetings and in brochures for event processing products. I hope that including the Glossary will contribute to improving our terminology and discussions, putting all of us on the same page, so to speak.

There is a saying that “books are never published, they are abandoned.” That is certainly the case with this one. I could have gone on improving it and adding more detail to it for another year. But I may not live that long! There comes a time to abandon a book to the publisher. So, having told you that, I do hope you’ll find this little book useful.

CHAPTER 1

Event Processing and the Survival of the Modern Enterprise

All the world’s information is at your fingertips—but can you make use of it?

—Vinton Cerf, 2005

You probably think that every twenty-first-century enterprise uses events and event processing in its business operations. That would seem obvious, given our information-driven world, which is inundated with sources of events from just about everywhere. But you would be wrong! The truth is that a lot of businesses think they use event processing. And, yes, a lot of them do—in their network management and communications. A few businesses go further and use event processing to drive some of their operations, such as supply chain management or consumer relations. And then there are the electronic stock trading and online gaming industries, both of which are totally event driven, but those are niche markets for event processing.

Many times, it turns out on closer inspection that businesses could make much greater use of the events already at their disposal in their business operations and planning. They could do a lot more with today’s event processing technology than they currently do to improve the running of the enterprise, their awareness of the business environment, and consequently their business decision making—and it would benefit them greatly in terms of their competitiveness and profitability if they did. Indeed, for some of them, adopting the latest event processing technology in their intelligence gathering and business planning may become a matter of survival.

This book has four goals:

Firstly, to explain the concepts of event processing and to answer basic questions such as “what do you mean by an event?”Secondly, to describe strategies for applying event processing in business and enterprise management, not only to run business operations but also as a tool for business intelligence and a basis for planningThirdly, to describe the progress and probable limitations of commercial event processing technologyFinally, to explore some of the future trends in event processing and its pervasive supporting role in very large–scale information systems

We include a short survey of how event processing has been a basis for different technology areas from discrete event simulation to business process management over the past sixty years. This gives some background about the multiple roles event processing is playing nowadays in everything from weather forecasting to operating a business or running a government.

The final chapter outlines some of the longer-term developments in event processing technology and the roles it will eventually play in the information infrastructure of our society. Many future applications are quite easily predicted now, and the only surprises are in finding out how long they will take to actually happen!