TIBCO BusinessEvents is a declarative, distributed event processing platform covering multiple event processing use cases. Different use cases are supported using optional modules. This section focuses on an overview of the major components of the core product, and some details about the add-on product modules, available separately.
The core product provides essential features such as channels, events and concepts, rules and rule functions, distributed cache, monitoring and management, tester, and so on. Add-on product modules, available separately, support specific functions and roles. For example:
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A BPM user might be primarily interested in TIBCO BusinessEvents™ Decision Manager and supporting rules. TIBCO BusinessEvents Decision Manager provides a business rules application for business users, with decision tables and trees to represent actionable business rules, and a rules management server for workflow management.
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A BAM project might only need TIBCO BusinessEvents™ Views dashboards and supporting rules. TIBCO BusinessEvents Views provides real-time web-based dashboards that give visibility into the data flowing through a running BusinessEvents application, using meaningful metrics that are presented to business users for proactive decision making.
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A monitoring application might use TIBCO BusinessEvents™ Event Stream Processing and associated rules, possibly in conjunction with TIBCO BusinessEvents Data Modeling. TIBCO BusinessEvents Event Stream Processing provides continuous and snapshot queries and an event pattern matching framework.
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Design time activities performed using the BusinessEvents resources include building an ontology — a set of concepts, scorecards and events that represent the objects and activities in your business — and building rules that are triggered when instances of ontology objects that fulfill certain criteria arrive in events. The output of the design-time activities is an enterprise archive (EAR) file, ready to deploy (or configure for deployment as needed).
See tutorials in TIBCO BusinessEvents Getting Started to learn more.
Studio is an Eclipse-based project building environment. It organizes project resources and makes the project organization and the project resources visible in graphical ways.
BusinessEvents Studio Development Provides resources for building BusinessEvents projects.
BusinessEvents Studio Debug Provides resources for debugging rules and rule functions in BusinessEvents projects, as well as testing running engines without debugging.
BusinessEvents Studio Diagram Provides interactive graphical views of a project that allow you to see relationships between project resources.
BusinessEvents Studio Decision Table Provides resources for building decision tables. (Available with TIBCO BusinessEvents Decision Manager.)
BusinessEvents Studio State Modeler Provides resources for building state models. It allows you to model states of ontology concept instances and use those states in rules. (Available with TIBCO BusinessEvents Data Modeling.)
TIBCO BusinessEvents communicates with TIBCO ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks through a provided plug-in that contains a palette of ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks Activities. Details are provided in
TIBCO BusinessEvents Developer’s Guide.
Administration of a deployed system involves management of objects generated by the inference engine, deploy-time configuration for tuning and other aspects of the system, deployment, management, and monitoring.
This section describes the native BusinessEvents deploy-time components. You can instead use TIBCO Administrator for deployment, monitoring, and management. Customers who are already using TIBCO Administrator may find this more convenient, though the BusinessEvents Monitoring and Management component has useful features, such as the runtime monitor, that are not available with TIBCO Administrator.
How you manage objects generated by the rules executing in the inference engine depends on whether you want to keep them for later use. You can manage objects in memory only, or using a persistence database, or using a cache and backing store.
The recommended way to manage objects for most production needs is to use a cache and a backing store. When cache-based object management is used, agents of different types co-operate to provide efficient object storage and access, with options to use load balancing and fault tolerance of data and engine processes.
Object management is partly a design-time and partly an administration topic, because your choice of object management method can affect how you design rules. For example, you may have to retrieve objects if they are stored only in the cache or only in the backing store, so they can be used in the Rete network. See
Chapter 6, Object Management Options for an introduction to these topics.
Using the CDD editor, you edit the CDD file to specify all the deploy-time properties for the entire cluster, from cluster-wide settings dealing with object management, through
processing unit settings (that is, those at the BusinessEvents engine level), to individual
agent class settings.
To deploy any engine (processing unit) in the cluster, the only details needed are: the EAR file, which contains project resources, the CDD file, and the name of the processing unit (a unit that deploys as an engine).
The MM component enables you to deploy cache-based BusinessEvents engines, and then monitor, and manage a deployed cluster. It uses a canvas-based site topology editor to configure the physical deployment of the cluster. It also provides a web-based dashboard, the MM Console, to enable you to monitor the deployment and perform the various tasks.
You can configure the health metric and alert thresholds that define the graphical display of system health, and the actions to take when thresholds are reached, such as sending email.
MM monitoring features enable you to easily spot bottlenecks or other troublespots in the system so you can address any issues. MM has a profiler and can generate other helpful reports.