The Common Base Event is an XML document that defines a common representation of events that is intended for use by enterprise management and business applications. The Common Base Event defines common fields, the values they can take, and the exact meanings of these values. An application creates an event object whenever something happens that either needs to be recorded for later analysis or which might require the trigger of additional work. An event is a structured notification that reports information that is related to a situation. An event reports three kinds of information:
The application that creates the event object is called the event source. Event sources can use a common structure for the event. The accepted standard for such a structure is called the Common Base Event. The Common Base Event is an XML document that is defined as part of the autonomic computing initiative.
The Common Base Event model is a standard that defines a common representation of events that is intended for use by enterprise management and business applications. This standard, which is developed by the IBM Autonomic Computing Architecture Board, supports encoding of logging, tracing, management, and business events using a common XML-based format. This format makes it possible to correlate different types of events that originate from different applications. For more information about the Common Base Event model, see the Common Base Event specification (Canonical Situation Data Format: The Common Base Event V1.0.1). The common event infrastructure currently supports Version 1.0.1 of the specification.
The basic concept behind the Common Base Event model is the situation. A situation can be anything that happens anywhere in the computing infrastructure, such as a server shutdown, a disk-drive failure, or a failed user login. The Common Base Event model defines a set of standard situation types that accommodate most of the situations that might arise (for example, StartSituation and CreateSituation).
The Common Base Event contains all of the information that is needed by the consumers to understand the event. This information includes data about the runtime environment, the business environment, and the instance of the application object that created the event.
For complete details on the Common Base Event format, see the XML schema
that is included in the Common Base Event specification document, at ftp://www6.software.ibm.com/software/developer/library/ac-toolkitdg.pdf .