Leverage SAP AEM Event Portal for Easier EDA Integration and Governance

This is the second in a series of blog posts that explore why SAP customers should embrace event-driven architecture (EDA) and how SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh can support this transformation at every stage of the journey.

In the first post, From Traditional to Real-Time: Enhance SAP with Advanced Event Mesh, I explained why SAP customers need to adopt event-driven architecture (EDA), the value of SAP Integration Suite advanced event mesh, types of events in SAP, challenges SAP ECC customers face, and most importantly how effective event management and governance makes or breaks EDA adoption for SAP customers.

SAP architects and developers who are naturally inclined to adopt a design-first approach to solution designing and implementation gain a wide range of benefits by incorporating event governance and management, such as:

• Data quality and consistency
• Security and compliance
• Performance optimization
• Monitoring and observability
• Scalability and flexibility
• Interoperability

In this post, I will talk more about the event portal capabilities of the SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh and why it’s critical for SAP customers to adopt it into their EDA journey.

How Event Portal Accelerates the Adoption of EDA and Maximizes its Value

SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh includes an event portal designed to help organizations efficiently design, deploy, and manage event-driven architectures (EDA). It offers features for event discovery, design, governance, and management, making it easier for businesses to embrace EDA and maximize its benefits.

Key Benefits of SAP AEM Event Portal for SAP Customers

Simplified Event Discovery and Management

• Centralized Repository: Catalog and discover all events, both SAP standard and custom, within the enterprise ecosystem.
• Comprehensive Management: Manage event schemas, metadata, and lifecycle, ensuring a single source of truth and reducing discrepancies.

Enhanced Event Design and Governance

• Intuitive Design Tools: Graphically model event-driven architecture, design event flows, and define schemas.
• Robust Governance: Manage event lifecycle with access controls, version management, and auditing to ensure compliance and security.

Improved Collaboration and Alignment\

• Shared Platform: Easy collaboration among IT, development, and business units for cohesive event-driven solutions by allowing developers self-service access to events, sharing Event APIs across partners and teams and more.
• Business-IT Alignment: Bridge the gap between business requirements and technical implementation, aligning EDA initiatives with strategic goals for maximum value.

Empowered User Self-Service with Governance

• Controlled Innovation: Empower users to explore event artifacts and flows, identify new use cases, and deploy runtime configurations—all within a governed, secure workflow that integrates seamlessly with existing business processes and systems.

For SAP customers, the SAP AEM Event Portal is a crucial enabler of EDA, streamlining its adoption and maximizing its benefits. By simplifying event management, enhancing design and governance, enabling seamless integration, the portal helps SAP customers reap the full business benefits of EDA. This approach boosts operational efficiency via reuse, drives innovation, and enhances agility and competitiveness. Embracing the SAP AEM Event Portal transforms event management, leading to more responsive, scalable, and intelligent enterprise systems.

AsyncAPI and its Compatibility with AEM Event Portal

AsyncAPI is an open-source initiative designed to standardize asynchronous communication between microservices, applications and systems. It provides a framework for defining event driven APIs, similar to how OpenAPI is used for RESTful APIs. With AsyncAPI, it’s possible to create well-documented, consistent and machine-readable specifications for events and messages, enabling easier integration and collaboration across diverse systems.

In the context of the SAP Advanced Event Mesh Event Portal, AsyncAPI is fully compatible, allowing SAP customers to leverage its specification format to describe, visualize, and manage their event-driven architectures. The Event Portal supports AsyncAPI definitions, enabling seamless integration of events across SAP and non-SAP applications. This compatibility ensures that organizations can adopt a standardized approach to event management, enhancing interoperability, reducing integration complexity, and fostering a more agile and responsive enterprise architecture.

Generating AsyncAPI Specs for SAP Events

SAP Business Accelerator Hub

The SAP Business Accelerator Hub (formerly SAP API Business Hub) is a platform offering a central repository of APIs, pre-built integrations, and event specifications. Events in this hub are standard notifications from various SAP systems like SAP Ariba, S4 Hana, Customer Experience, etc. and are not customizable.

The AsycnAPI specifications for these standard events are available for download from the SAP Business Accelerator Hub.

Figure 1: SAP Business accelerator hub AsyncAPI download
Source

Asapio Connector for SAP Advanced Event Mesh

Following what I discussed in the earlier blog “From Legacy to Real-Time: Enhance SAP with Advanced Event Mesh”, the Asapio Integration for SAP AEM supports publishing and consuming custom events making SAP systems more efficient and responsive.

It’s possible to export these custom event definitions as AsyncAPI specifications as seen here:

Figure 2: AsyncAPI spec from Asapio plugin

Importing AsyncAPI Specs with AsyncAPI Importer

SAP AEM provides several REST APIs for creating or modifying objects and services within the AEM Event Portal. These REST APIs require a token, generated and assigned roles in the AEM Cloud console, to access brokers, the Event Portal, and perform various operations.

To facilitate this process, an open-source CLI utility tool has been developed. This tool internally invokes the aforementioned REST APIs to create, update, or delete AEM Event Portal objects in a clean, version-controlled manner. The tool can be used as a standalone utility or embedded into CI/CD pipelines or other automated mechanisms.

Installing the tool

Install the AsyncAPI Importer CLI tool with a Node package manager or NPM like this:
npm install @solace-labs/ep-async-api-importer -g

Generating the AEM Token

Since the CLI utility tool internally invokes the AEM Cloud REST APIs, it also requires an access token to function. The documentation over here: Create Token defines in detail the steps for creating a token.

Configuring behavior using flags

The CLI tool’s behavior can be configured by several flags and options. Some examples are listed below:

Other options supported by the CLI tool can be found at the details page: AsyncAPI Importer CLI or by running the help command as ep-async-api-importer -h

Using the CLI

Below is an example of importing a single AsyncAPI specification file:
ep-async-api-importer --filePattern FILE_NAME --domain sap-s4-operational-events

Another example of importing multiple AsyncAPI specification file where with a glob pattern can be used to identify multiple AsyncAPI specifications that need to be imported:
ep-async-api-importer –filePattern  '/*.json' --domain sap-s4-operational-events

In both the cases a successful import process will result in event(s), schema(s) and Event API(s) being imported into the AEM Event Portal as seen here:

Image 3: SAP Event specs imported into AEM Event Portal

Image 4: SAP Event schemas imported into AEM Event Portal

Image 5: SAP Events imported into AEM Event Portal as Event APIs

With this, SAP architects, designers and developers can use the SAP AEM Event Portal to design, catalog and govern their EDA architecture and artefacts.

Summary and What’s Next

This article continues our discussion on adopting EDA for SAP customers, focusing on how SAP Integration Suite advanced event mesh and its event portal accelerate EDA adoption. The event portal offers a range of capabilities, including event discovery, design, governance, and management, simplifying event-driven architecture integration across diverse systems.

Key benefits of the SAP AEM Event Portal include:

• Simplified Event Management: Centralized repository and comprehensive tools for managing event schemas, metadata, and lifecycle.
• Enhanced Design and Governance: Intuitive design tools, robust governance, and version management for secure and compliant event management.
• Improved Collaboration: A shared platform that aligns business and IT, fostering cohesive event-driven solutions.

Additionally, the compatibility of the AsyncAPI framework with the Event Portal facilitates standardized and efficient management of asynchronous communications across SAP and non-SAP systems. Practical steps for generating AsyncAPI specifications for SAP events and importing them into the Event Portal using a CLI utility tool are also covered.

This comprehensive suite of tools enables SAP customers to fully leverage EDA, enhancing operational efficiency, innovation, and agility, thereby transforming event management and fostering a more responsive, scalable enterprise architecture.

In the final part of this blog series, I will dive deeper into how SAP integration architects, product managers, and developers can unlock the full potential of the event portal to discover and manage business-critical events across multiple business lines with robust governance. You’ll also learn how the extensible features of the event portal can drive innovation by generating high-quality scaffolding code, and accelerating integration with both SAP and non-SAP systems, including SAP Cloud Platform Integration (CPI). Discover how these tools empower your teams to seamlessly connect and scale your enterprise architecture for greater agility and responsiveness.