The Common Event Infrastructure (CEI) is used to provide basic management services for events. The format of those events is defined by the Common Base Event specification.
The Common Event Infrastructure (CEI) is used to provide basic event management services, such as event generation, transmission, persistence, and consumption. CEI was developed to address industry-wide problems in exchanging events between incompatible systems, many of which employed different event infrastructures, event formats, and data stores. Using CEI, previously incompatible systems are now capable of sharing a single infrastructure and using a single API, which facilitates data exchange between applications written by the same vendors or different vendors.
Although CEI provides an infrastructure for event management, it does not define the format of events. This is defined by the Common Base Event specification, which provides a standard XML-based format for business events, system events, and performance information. Application developers and administrators can use the Common Base Event specification for structuring and developing event types.
The key concept in the Common Base Event model is the situation, which is any occurrence that happens anywhere in the computing system, such as a user login or a scheduled server shutdown. The Common Base Event model defines a set of standard situation types, such as StartSituation and CreateSituation, that accommodate most of the situations that might arise.
The Common Base Event specification is part of the IBM Autonomic Computing Toolkit. For more information about the specification, visit the IBM Autonomic Computing Web site.