One of the ideas in an event based architecture that I really like is the idea of composed events. A composed event is an event that is defined in terms of other events. For example, in my previous post I mentioned a 'PossibleBruteForceAttack' event. This event is defined as having occurred when 3 or more failed login attempts occur for the same username. One of the things I like most about this is how it mirrors reality. How many times have you been able to accurately describe a system failure based on correlated events? Its the kind of experience that the long timers can have for specific systems, but instead of it being a 'gut feeling' we make it explicit. By making it explicit we can test it for accuracy over time.
So what does this technique do for us? Well beyond being able to define these kinds of complex events it also lets us extend our systems without actually modifying the system, since we can simply compose these events by subscribing to them and then publishing a new event. You could take a system that produces events on the changing price of a financial instrument and then have a new component that watches this stream of events for large swings in price. This could then be announced as new CrazyMarket event. This is also another way you might look to use the
blogjecting watchdog pattern to monitor system health by correlating fault messages to the server logs.
Anyways, I just think it is cool. :)
-d
Posted
Sat, Sep 19 2009 12:44 PM
by
drusellers