Event Portal Definition

An event portal is a solution that lets people design, create, discover, catalog, share, visualize, secure, and manage events and event-driven applications. Event portals serve three primary audiences:

  1. Architects use an event portal to define, discuss and review the events, data definitions, and application relationships.
  2. Developers use an event portal to discover, understand and reuse events across applications, lines of business and between external organizations.
  3. Data Scientists use an event portal to understand event-driven data and discover new insights by combining events.

According to Gartner: “While most organizations have basic event processing infrastructure, many don’t have the high-level productivity tooling that helps developers design, develop, test and manage event-centric applications… Nor do they have tools for governing, publishing and managing event-based interfaces.”*

How is an event portal different from a schema registry?

A schema registry helps you discover the events/messages that exist within your organization and understand the payload schemas so you can A) understand if they include information your application needs, and B) create business logic that extracts those data elements. Without this “schema” payload contract, you do not know the format of the data.

The ability to auto-discover events and let developers and architects review a menu of what’s available is useful, but to effectively deploy and manage events and event-driven applications at enterprise-scale, you also need to be able to:

  1. Govern the behavior and usage of events
  2. Use a wide variety of payload schemas
  3. Collaborate on the design and deployment of events

An event portal should enable you to design your event-driven applications, events, and schemas in one tool, and automatically visualize them as interconnected network diagrams that your team can go over in design reviews. That way when you deploy your events and event-driven applications, it’s easy to see if the design is in sync with the reality in runtime (and changes are all version controlled and tracked).

An event portal should let you do the following:

Define and model event-driven systems

  • Organize your systems into application domains
  • Create and/or import payload schema definitions in a variety of formats
  • Create events and their topic structure
  • Design each application’s asynchronous pub/sub interface

Visualize existing relationships

  • Event flows crossing application domain or organizations
  • Application interactions
  • Event flow to and from each application

Quickly develop consistent event-driven applications

  • Export AsyncAPI 2.0.0 specifications
  • Use code generators to broker API code for your applications

Discover and share events of interest

  • Advertise and share events for reuse
  • Create new applications using events from other groups/teams

Govern your event-driven system

  • Understand the lineage of event data
  • Determine impact of upcoming changes to apps, events and schemas
  • Control consumption of events across teams/application domains

Integrate with 3rd-party systems for programmatic interactions, including:

  • Bulk importing existing EDA models
  • Integrating with CI/CD pipelines
  • Creating custom reports

 Manage and audit changes to events, schemas and apps

  • Make updates to existing apps, events, and schemas to create new revisions
  • Create new versions of apps, events and schemas by starting from the latest revision of an existing version
  • Roll back to previous object revision
  • Undo accidentally deleted objects
  • Audit and track changes to individual users

 Runtime event discovery (in preview)

  • Capture events flowing across all of your event brokers (Appliance, Software and As a Service)
  • Visualize the event topic hierarchy being used
  • Understand statistics about your events

*Gartner “Top 3 Trends in Application Architecture That Enable Digital Business” Anne Thomas, Yefim Natis, Mark O’Neill, 28 Oct 2019