Event Portal Overview

Event Portal provides cloud-based event management capabilities that improve developer productivity, enhance governance and compliance, facilitate improved collaboration across teams, and enable efficient design and analysis of event flows, ultimately leading to faster time-to-market and reduced errors in event-driven applications and services.

Event Portal supports modeling your EDA for the multiple operational environments that you maintain for your software development lifecycle. You can have multiple versions of applications, events, schemas, and enumerations, which enables you to maintain production versions while you develop and test new versions to extend and enhance your EDA at the same time.

Event Portal offers runtime discovery and cataloging of events, schemas, and application interactions. It also allows middleware and integrations teams to enable developers to define runtime configurations required for their applications and deploy them to event brokers themselves in PubSub+ Cloud or as part of an automated deployment process.

Event Portal also provides request and approval workflows for event access so data owners have the controls necessary to govern access to event data in the runtime.

Using Event Portal

Organizations typically start using Event Portal in one of these ways:

• as a design-first tool that you can use to create, model, and manage your EDAs

• as a discover-first tool that you can use to audit existing EDAs and model updates before you implement them

Solace recommends a design-first approach. If you have a large, existing, EDA estate, you can start with a discover-first approach to examine your current EDA, and switch to a design-first approach to move forward. Which approach you start with depends on several factors.

Work Flow	Description
Design-First	When you use Event Portal as a design-first tool, you start in Designer to model the events and applications you require in your EDA. You can use a visual graph view to design the relationships between publishing and subscribing applications on your event brokers and create a model of your EDA. From the model, you can push application and queue configurations to your Solace event brokers. The design-first approach is best in these circumstances: You want to create a new EDA using Event Portal's graphical design tools. You want to manage queue configuration on your event brokers from Event Portal. Your organization focuses on API-first development.
Discover-First	When you use Event Portal as a discover-first tool, you have event brokers within an existing EDA. You can import consumer and event details to create a model of your EDA in Event Portal and use Event Portal to update and maintain your design. After you discover your EDA, you can use Event Portal as a design tool for your EDA, but perform all configuration updates on the event broker using your existing tools, or you can use your discovered data to help you create a new model of your EDA in Event Portal to maintain your design and configure your EDA going forward. The discover-first approach is a good choice when you have a large, mature EDA estate that you want to import into Event Portal. After you have imported your EDA, you can use all of the benefits provided by Event Portal by moving to a design-first work flow. You may want to continue with the discover-first work flow in these circumstances: You are using third-party event brokers. Your security policies do not allow Event Portal to connect and push configuration updates to your operational event brokers.

Getting Started With Event Portal

Regardless of whether you're starting by using Event Portal to design and configure your EDA or to import a model of your existing EDA, the first step is usually to set up Event Portal to align with your organizational structure, software development, and operational processes.

First, you create application domains in Designer to align with your application or developer teams, or with the functional areas of your EDA. Application teams usually map to one or more application domains.

The remaining steps differ depending on whether you're starting with a design-first approach or a discover-first approach:

• To get started by designing your EDA, see Setting up Event Portal to Design and Configure Your EDA.

• To get started by importing a model of your existing EDA, see Setting up Event Portal to Discover and Audit Your Existing EDA.

Setting up Event Portal to Design and Configure Your EDA

If you plan to use Event Portal to design EDAs and configure your event brokers, get started with Event Portal using the following steps.

	In Designer, create application domains. It is a best practice to set a topic domain for each application domain. Topic domains define the top levels of your topic hierarchy. You can use topic domains as the base for the topic addresses for events within the application domain. For more information about topic hierarchy and best practices, see Topic Architecture Best Practices.
	Create events. In Event Portal, an event defines an event type that represents individual event instances produced in an EDA. You create events in Designer to define the messages that applications publish for every instance of an event as it happens in real-time. Every event has one or more topic addresses that define the topics of each event instance. Topic addresses can include variable values to represent data specific to an event instance. Event brokers use topics to route event instances from publishing to subscribing applications.
	Create applications. An application in Event Portal represents client software that produces and consumes events. The underlying implementation can take many forms, such as custom Java code, an iPaaS like Boomi, or SAP CPI. Within an application, a consumer represents a queue or direct subscription on an event broker. In applications, you can configure elements of your event broker runtime, including client details and queues, that you can push to your event brokers.
	Set up one or more environments to represent the operational environments within your organization. For example, you may have development environments, testing environments, a staging environment, and a production environment. If you intend to configure application details and queues from Event Portal, the target environment must be enabled for runtime configuration.
	In Runtime Event Manager, create a modeled event mesh and add one or more model event brokers to it. Each modeled event mesh represents the event flows through one or more event brokers in a specific runtime environment. They help you define and visualize event flows between publishing and subscribing applications.
	Set up a connection between Event Portal and your operational event brokers in the runtime. If your event broker services are in a Customer-Controlled Region or Dedicated Region in the same PubSub+ Cloud account, you can enable Event Portal connections for all event broker services in a datacenter. For more information see Connecting Event Broker Services to Event Portal With a PubSub+ Cloud Connection. If your security requirements wont allow a Solace-managed connection, or you want to connect to other supported event brokers, you must use an independently managed connection to Event Portal. For more information see Setting Up a Connection to Event Portal.
	Add applications to model event brokers in one or more environments After you add applications with the events they publish and consume, you can view the modeled event mesh and the relationships between applications and events. If you have enabled runtime configuration for your environment, adding applications to a modeled event mesh also pushes the application configuration to the operational event brokers represented in the modeled event mesh.

Setting up Event Portal to Discover and Audit Your Existing EDA

If you plan to use Event Portal to discover consumer, event, and schema details and create a model of existing EDAs, you can get started with Event Portal using the following steps.

	In Designer, create application domains and set user access to them. It is a best practice to set a topic domain for each application domain. Topic domains define the top levels of your topic hierarchy. You can use topic domains as the base for the topic addresses for events within the application domain. For more information about topic hierarchy and best practices, see Topic Architecture Best Practices. Administrators and Event Portal Managers have full access to all application domains. You can give Event Portal Users Viewer, Editor, or Manager access to individual application domains.
	Set up your environments. For each environment you can configure which Event Portal Users have access to view and edit the modeled event meshes it contains.
	In Runtime Event Manager, create a modeled event mesh and add one or more model event brokers to it. Each modeled event mesh represents the event flows through one or more event brokers in a specific runtime environment. They help you define and visualize event flows between publishing and subscribing applications.
	Set up a connection between Event Portal and your operational event brokers in the runtime. If your event broker services are in a Customer-Controlled Region or Dedicated Region in the same PubSub+ Cloud account, you can enable Event Portal connections for all event broker services in a datacenter. For more information see Connecting Event Broker Services to Event Portal With a PubSub+ Cloud Connection. If your security requirements wont allow a Solace-managed connection, or you want to connect to other supported event brokers, you must use an independently managed connection to Event Portal. For more information see Setting Up a Connection to Event Portal.
	Run a discovery scan to collect queue and subscription configuration data from your runtime event brokers and audit the data against any existing EDA data in Designer.
	View the audit results comparing the scanned data and any existing EDA data in Designer. If you're just getting started, your audit result will all have the status "Found Only in Runtime".
	Import the objects to create applications and events in Designer. The imported objects become part of a modeled event mesh that maps to your mature EDA.
	View the modeled event mesh that represents the relationships between applications and events in your imported data.

Event Portal Tools

Event Portal includes several tools to help you design, manage, and govern your EDA:

• Designer helps you create and update all of the objects you use to design your EDA and configure queues that you can add and update on your operational event brokers.

• Catalog is a library of all the applications, events, schemas, and other objects in your organization's account in Event Portal.

• Runtime Event Manager helps you model your EDA using objects created in Designer or data collected from your operational event brokers. It also helps you create templates for queue configurations and client profile names, to make it easier to govern the resources configured on your event brokers and help developers configure client applications.

• KPI Dashboard displays key performance indicators (KPI) related to your event-driven architecture (EDA) to help you track the performance and efficiency of your EDA.

Additional Event Portal Features

Event Portal provides more features that you can use to design and manage EDAs.

• Control who has access to application domains and modeled event meshes. For more information, see Managing User Access to Event Portal.

• Update your assets and use semantic versioning and lifecycle states to manage your applications and events from draft through production and on to deprecation and retirement as you create new versions. For more information, see Object Versions and Lifecycle States.

• Create enumerations and complex schemas that your events can reference.

• Add custom attributes for application domains and objects.

• Require runtime configuration templates in an environment to manage queue configurations

• Govern the ability of applications to publish and consume events by requiring applications to request approval to publish or consume specific events. For more information, see Managing Event Data Access.

• Download AsyncAPI documents for applications to give to developers to help them create the runtime applications.

• Expose your events to API management platforms with Event APIs and Event API Products.

• Run new discovery scans and audit the results to import changes or make sure your runtime matches your design. For more information, see Auditing and Importing Runtime Data.