TIBCO BusinessEvents as CEP solution for complex problems
Pros
- One of the simplest use of TIBCO BusinessEvents, is for "Condition Detection" scope. Let's assume we like to monitor business services or our corporation, and create monitoring alerts whenever certain conditions are reached. For example, a monitoring rule could be: "when a service call receives more than 80% of fault responses within a minute, generate an alert (send an email)".
- In this scenario, TIBCO BusinessEvents offers a very powerful rule engine. In the rule engine will be defined all the monitoring rules, and their threshold. The rule engine will receive events with statistics information about service calls, eventually correlates and aggregates those message, and when particular condition are detected by the defined rules, an alert is generated
- One interesting capability of TIBCO BusinessEvents, is to recognize situation. One example over all, could help to understand the "Situation Recognition" scenario: the Bank Fraud detection.
- Let's assume a bank would like to define a solution to identify when a credit card fraud is in act. Now, a simple use of the credit card by its owner, most probably, is not a fraud. So the system should avoid to raise alert every time. But the system should be able to recognize certain suspicious conditions, as for example when the credit card has been used for purchase in a shop in Italy, and after a pair of hours in one store in USA.
- This means that one single event (usage in Italy) is not enough to define the fraud, but the system is able to keep the event, and process it once others events arrive, in order to recognize suspicious situation.
- One particular pattern, where TIBCO BusinessEvents would be very helpful, is for Track and Trace patterns.
- Let's consider an aviation company, that needs a process to follow customer's baggage. The customer drops off his baggage at airport, a bar code is assigned to it, that belongs to the owner. The baggage should follow a route to reach the target airplane, be loaded on the airplane, once arrived at destination unloaded and sent to the correct belt to be collected by its owner.
- All the steps above, con be modeled with a state machine, where the baggage change its state at each passage under a bar code reader for example.
- This solution would allow companies to track baggage from the beginning (when customer drops the baggage at counter) to the end (customer collects his baggage at destination), and establish any problem during the path.
Cons
- TIBCO BusinessEvents offers really several features, many way to customize and adapt it to own requirements. One interesting feature is the opportunity to create Rules, at runtime, by an user that is not developer, using rule templates.
- This feature, well implemented and with few interesting addon, has an architecture not very simple.
- For example, we have a Business Monitoring component, where the business user can define his monitoring rules, the rules are persisted on DB, and picked up at any time by another component.
- The component that reads the rules from the DB is not a rule engine, this means that is not performing very well for this scope, and also it needs each time to retrieve the rule to execute from the Database.
- Our intention is to substitute this last component with TIBCO BusinessEvents, in order to use the power of the rule engine. But, to create the rules, there is a new mechanism, that should be integrated with the existing GUI, and more else, the rules are persisted on file system.
- There is no way for the developer to auto create the rules internally, and enable them in the working memory, for example generate the rules from entries on a database, and create the rules directly in the working memory.
- The existing solution injects the new rules in the working memory from outside.
Return on Investment
- TIBCO BusinessEvents, whenever it was used consciously, gave a big improvement to the projects, solving complex problem not easily solved otherwise.
- Same solutions, realized in technologies as Java or TIBCO BusinessWorks, could require an effort of 40% more in terms of time or realization, compared with a BusinessEvents.
- And in terms of performance, we have had a comparison of a solution where monitoring rules had to be executed, developed with BusinessWorks and BusinessEvents.
- The BusinessEvents showed a capacity to perform up to 15x time faster, with the same load work
Alternatives Considered
Drools
