Solace's PubSub+ Event Portal

Event Portal is our event management tool that lets developers create, design, share, and manage events within an event-driven architecture. Now before you say "Why should I care?" I want to take you through a little memory exercise.

I want you to sit back and think of the last time you were about to make a change to an existing application that interacted with your event broker. Maybe this was just a small change, just a quick fix. Or maybe it was something that was a big part of an even larger overhaul. Regardless of the size of the task, before you jumped in to make the change you probably spent a bit of time thinking about how that change would have downstream effects. We all want to mitigate risk and avoid bugs. Maybe you needed to see all the events that your application produces or consumes. Or perhaps you thought about all the different applications that end up consuming a particular event. Ok, now that you've got the memory fixed in your mind, I want to ask you a few questions about how you went about discovering and viewing the events, the schemas, and the downstream applications. Ready?

Were they easy to find?
Were they all in one place?
Were they easy to read and understand?
Was it easy to identify topic hierarchy, or where you want to publish/subscribe to events?
and probably most important...
Were they up to date?

If you answered "No" to any of these questions then you're going to want to keep reading.

What if I told you Event Portal takes away all that pain and more, and it does it for your favorite broker? Not just Solace PubSub+, but Kafka, and RabbitMQ, and ActiveMQ, and, and, and. You name it, event portal can help. Whether you have one broker type or many you're going to want to keep reading.

Alright here we go!

Getting Started

First you need an account. If you haven't signed up for PubSub+ Cloud yet, this is where you're going to find Event Portal and get started. You can sign up here for a free 60 day trial, or if your organization is already using Event Portal ask your team to be added as a user.

Once you're logged into PubSub+ Cloud you're going to see three main tools in the Event Portal section:

Designer

Use the designer to create new application domains, applications, events, and schemas and, most importantly, visualize the topology of your event driven architecture. Get a visual understanding of how everything works together (or doesn't!) and make educated decisions about how to effectively change your code.

Check out these helpful resources to get started in the Designer:
Creating an Application Domain
Adding Applications, Events, Schemas
Adding Events to Your Application

Catalog

Use the Catalog when you just need to find something. You'll see the list of all applications, events, and schemas that have been created and can quickly search through them to find what you need. If you're just getting started and doing a proof of concept you might start small. But even in a proof of concept you can quickly get to the point where the list of applications, events, and schemas starts to grow long. Now you can use the Event Catalog to quickly browse and search all existing objects.
Use the Catalog to browse and Search
View the revision history for any object

Discovery

Use Discovery to automatically bring all of your existing events, applications, and schemas into the Designer so you don't have to manually add them one by one. This tool allows you to run a discovery agent on your broker that will capture a runtime

As of posting time Discovery is currently in Closed Beta. If you would like access to Discovery for your Event Portal, please email community@solace.com and request access.

Get started with the Event Portal Discovery agent for your broker(s) of choice

That's a wrap! Have you tried Event Portal? Let us know about your experience in the comments below.