Copyright © TIBCO Software Inc. All Rights Reserved
Copyright © TIBCO Software Inc. All Rights Reserved


Chapter 1 Introduction to TIBCO BusinessEvents : Main Product Components and Add-Ons

Main Product Components and Add-Ons
TIBCO BusinessEvents is a declarative, distributed event processing platform covering multiple event processing use cases. Different use cases are supported using optional add-on products, available separately.
Add-on Products
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 products, available separately, support specific functions and roles. For example:
A BPM user might be primarily interested in TIBCO BusinessEvents® Process Orchestration, with its ability to to segregate different event processing rule sets within the flow of a BPM process
TIBCO BusinessEvents® Decision Manager enables business analysts to construct detailed business rules using decision tables to represent actionable business rules, and a rules management server for workflow management.
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 TIBCO BusinessEvents application, using meaningful metrics that are presented to business users for proactive decision making.
A sense and respond application might only use TIBCO BusinessEvents® Data Modeling, with supporting rules. TIBCO BusinessEvents Data Modeling provides entity lifecycle management using state machines, and direct database interaction using JDBC database concepts.
A monitoring application could 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.
TIBCO BusinessEvents Express
If your application requires only In Memory object management, TIBCO BusinessEvents Express edition may meet your needs. This edition does not support Cache OM, backing store, or any features dependent on them.
TIBCO BusinessEvents Design-time Components
Design-time activities performed using the TIBCO 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.
TIBCO BusinessEvents Studio
TIBCO BusinessEvents 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.
Perspectives
The Eclipse plug-ins for TIBCO BusinessEvents and for TIBCO BusinessEvents add-ons provide these perspectives:
TIBCO BusinessEvents Studio Development  Provides resources for building TIBCO BusinessEvents projects.
TIBCO BusinessEvents Studio Debug  Provides resources for debugging rules and rule functions in TIBCO BusinessEvents projects, as well as testing running engines without debugging.
TIBCO BusinessEvents Studio Diagram  Provides interactive graphical views of a project that allow you to see relationships between project resources.
TIBCO BusinessEvents Studio Decision Table  Provides resources for building decision tables. (Available with TIBCO BusinessEvents Decision Manager.)
TIBCO 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.)
Integration with TIBCO ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks
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.
TIBCO BusinessEvents Administration Components
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 TIBCO BusinessEvents components. For cache, you can optionally use a supported version of Oracle Coherence, for which you have a license that is appropriate for your usage. For deployment, monitoring, and management, you can optionally use TIBCO Administrator. Customers who are already using these software products may find it convenient to continue to do so. These products are not provided with TIBCO BusinessEvents.
Object Management
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 distributed cache, or using a cache with a 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 type 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 Types for an introduction to these topics.
Deploy-time Configuration Settings are in the Cluster Deployment Descriptor (CDD)
Using the Cluster Deployment Descriptor (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 TIBCO BusinessEvents engine level), to individual agent class settings.
To deploy any engine (processing unit) in the cluster, the only details needed are these: the EAR file, which contains all the project resources, the CDD file, and the name of the processing unit (a unit that deploys as an engine).
You can change deploy-time configuration settings in the CDD file, without having to rebuild the EAR file.
TIBCO BusinessEvents Monitoring and Management (MM)
The MM component enables you to deploy cache-based or in-memory TIBCO 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 also has a profiler and can generate other helpful reports.
Deployment Topology Configuration Using a Site Topology Editor
See Deploy-time and Runtime Overview for details.

Copyright © TIBCO Software Inc. All Rights Reserved
Copyright © TIBCO Software Inc. All Rights Reserved