Integrating API and event management

As the adoption of event-driven architectures continues to proliferate, understanding the maturity of those events and their usage is becoming even more critical. This is because the ability to discover, use, and create event-driven applications can solve real-time business needs in ways not possible before.

However, the value these events can provide to potential applications is linked to the quality of the description and the maturity of the events themselves. Without the ability to document an event, it cannot be discovered. Without the ability to manage an event’s visibility or usage, it might be impossible to share.

This problem space has parallels with another discipline: API management. Managing APIs has similar challenges to event management: APIs need to be documented and to be discoverable, they need to be mature, and they need to have an enforcement point to manage exposure and rules of engagement on clients that invoke those APIs.

While API management and event management offerings provide similar capabilities, they each need to cater for the unique needs and characteristics of the technologies they describe, manage and socialize. This section will detail the similarities and differences between API and event management, and how the two can be combined to enable multi-form management.

Event Endpoint Management can be integrated with IBM API Connect 10.0.6 and later, the API management offering from IBM.