OI Architecture
The Importance of Events and Event Feeds
At the root of Operational Intelligence lies the data, or event feeds (sometimes called “event streams”). An event feed is a sequence of changes to a data item or business condition. The simplest example is the familiar stock market ticker, which shows the fluctuating prices for stocks traded on the stock exchange. Most databases and many applications provide a notification or a trigger when a data value changes. An Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) together with integration tools can turn these notifications into an event feed which then can be transmitted to multiple applications, and filtered and correlated with real-time sources or data from data warehouses, CRM and ERP applications. The data is made available to Business and IT users via rich Web 2.0 dashboards which can easily display information from multiple sources and visually compare real-time and historical data. Users can drill down into the context of the data, and send feeds back to an event manager to trigger an automated response. Events are evaluated against relevant policies which can then automatically initiate a new business process or workflow, empowering users to take action in context.
Architecture of an Operational Intelligence Solution
1. Data is accessed from a variety of sources and grouped into “event feeds” based on logical topics.
2. Event feeds are conveyed via an Enterprise Service Bus, based on SOA standards, to other components.
3. The analytic server with its embedded CEP engine filters and analyzes the different event feeds, correlates with related historical data, and calculates results on a continuous basis.
4. The results are organized into “result feeds” and forwarded to other components, including dashboards and an Event Manager.
5. Dashboards and reports are generated for user consumption and displayed in a standard browser.
6. Users can drill down into the originating system to see data details or related contextual data.
7. Selected event feeds and result feeds are also sent to an “event manager” for automated responses.
8. The event manager evaluates each event against relevant policies, each policy being a set of rules expressing a business objective. When a policy is matched, an associate action is triggered, which could be as simple as sending a notification or invoking a web service, or as sophisticated as initiating a new business process or workflow in a BPM system.
9. During the execution of a business process the BPMS can request additional contextual data from the original data sources.
10. The BPMS forwards process status as an event feed that can be analyzed, displayed, and drilled into as described above.