Complex Event Processing off the shelf - Rapid development of event-driven applications with solution templates

Complex Event Processing (CEP) enables companies to monitor and control business processes in near real time. Despite the vast potential of generic CEP frameworks, experience showed that adopters are often overwhelmed with the inherent complexity of CEP, and heavily rely on external expertise to set up the required event-processing logic. In this paper we present a novel approach to creating, packaging and deploying event-based applications. Based on the event- processing framework SARI, so-called solution templates allow offering well-proven, standardized event-processing logic for common business needs. Delivering many benefits of off-the-shelf software while maintaining the flexibility of a CEP-based architecture, solution templates can easily be tailored to the specific business processes and needs of an individual corporation by customer-side domain experts. Real-time event processing logic is assembled from predefined, easy-to-use building blocks, in a way that fully abstracts from the underlying complexity. Event analysis is supported by predefined configurations for querying and visualizing historic event data. We demonstrate our approach using a real-world application from the workload automation domain.