Examining SAP Integration Suite, Advanced Event Mesh

The challenges in today’s fast-paced, digitally-driven world are enormous. However, some of them include the fact that traditional on-premise integration technology can’t keep up with the demands of integrating modern cloud-based and digitized application landscapes. Hence, modern integration approaches must be cloud native and hybrid, and must function in regionally distributed landscapes. This is, where real-time event-based integration comes into play, as it leverages emerging best practice for high-volume data-driven state-of-the-art omnichannel and supply chain solutions.

SAP provides highly sophisticated tools and methodologies to power all kinds of modern integrations with SAP Integration Suite. With the help of this intelligent tool, on-premise architectures can be efficiently moved to modern cloud-based integration approaches. On top, event-driven integrations add modern real-time integration capabilities to complement this market leading mix.

SAP has been delivering event-driven integration through SAP Event Mesh for several years. Recently, it has added SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh to help our customers support more integration scenarios and manage and monitor events across their entire lifecycle.

Let’s compare the two solutions to understand commonalities and differences:

• Both solutions are fully managed cloud services and can be used to integrate SAP and non-SAP systems through a network of event brokers.
• Unique to SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh is the ability to:
  • Manage and monitor events, which is essential to ensure governance. As you scale event-based integration across your business and with third parties, event management becomes a must.
  • Enable event lifecycle management - from design to publishing to discovery. This way, you can set, establish and enforce best practices and facilitate sharing and reuse.
  • Create and publish event API products that are groups of asynchronous APIs that fulfill some specific business functions. With them, you can provide separate lines of business and any third parties all the information they need to subscribe and leverage a set of events. The documentation and code are ApyncAPI compliant. The code can be automatically generated.
  • Run natively on various public clouds – including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Note the SAP Event Mesh can also run on multiple public clouds but only within SAP BTP. In addition, Advanced Event Mesh can also run on-premises and at the edge.
  • Support event transactions; client applications can send or receive multiple messages in single atomic transactions within a session to maintain data consistency.
  • Allow new and existing clients to ask a broker to resend messages previously delivered - for example, when the receiving application crashes before committing messages to its database or a newly started application requires historical data to make decisions based on messages just received.
  • When it comes to sizing, the advanced edition allows for larger payloads and storage, providing greater use case flexibility.

The commonalities and differences of SAP Event Mesh and SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh are summarized in the following table:

From these commonalities and differences of the two solutions, the following conclusions can be drawn, which are summarized with a high-level comparison, when looking at parameters like target scenarios, main use cases, interfaces, and others:

In June 2022, SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh (AEM) was launched on SAP’s Business Technology Platform (BTP) as an event streaming, event management and monitoring platform, that enables organizations to implement modern event-driven architecture (EDA) application environments.

Thus, SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh is a fully-managed event streaming and management service that enables enterprise-grade event-driven architecture. It is part of SAP’s event-driven ecosystem and powers end-to-end event-driven architectures.

The components of SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh are summarized in the following figure: The Components of SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh

	Event Streaming Events are significant changes of state that a producer generates and one or many consumer(s) consume. These events are continuously generated, captured, and transmitted in real-time via one or many event broker(s)
	Event Management Event Portal is a centralized platform for the management, discovery, collaboration, and governance of events. It serves as a hub for organizing, documenting, and visualizing events, schemas, and related components
	Event Monitoring and Insights Observing, analyzing, and deriving information from events and related components involving monitoring event streams, identifying patterns, and gaining insights to improve system performance, troubleshoot issues, or make data-driven decisions

SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh is a distributed mesh of event brokers that offers a flexible and scalable solution for a variety of use cases. Whether you are working with a small deployment or a very large one, the brokers of SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh can be easily deployed in existing public or private cloud environments.

This system supports event streaming, event management, and event monitoring, providing you with the tools you need to effectively manage and monitor your events in real-time. Additionally, the advanced management toolset includes sophisticated features like message routing and filtering, giving you the flexibility to tailor the system to your specific needs.

Below, selected capabilities of SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh are listed, with the most relevant information:

As you can see, the capabilities of SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh are extensive. Not only does it provide a general purpose, multi-site EDA platform, but it also covers different use case scenarios, being it SAP to SAP, SAP to Everything or Everything to Everything.

SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh provides a full purpose eventing platform , complementing the basic offering of SAP Event Mesh for more demanding scenarios. With this integration, businesses can receive real-time updates on significant changes in their business applications throughout their ecosystem. This not only increases flexibility and scalability by loosely coupling business applications and infrastructure, but also helps break down silos and go beyond vendor boundaries by utilizing open standards and protocols. The benefits of this are clear: offering businesses a comprehensive solution for effectively managing their eventing needs.

Before you move on, take a look at the following high-speed overview of SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh, to strengthen your knowledge about the capabilities and benefits of SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh:

Once you access SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh (for an explanation on how to get access, see this documentation and see this documentation on how account and user management works), the cloud console of SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh welcomes you, and is therefore your first entry point.

The Cloud Console is a comprehensive user-interface that can be accessed via web from a public internet connection, allowing you to carry out a range of functions. These include the creation of new event broker services, viewing event meshes, and performing administrative tasks in Mission Control.

Furthermore, with the Cloud Console, you can monitor your event broker services using Insights, as well as discover, design, visualize, and manage your event-driven architecture (EDA) with the Event Portal. The Cloud Console, being part of the Home Cloud, has a 99.95% uptime, with data backups taken every four hours. Additionally, your account gives you the ability to manage user access to your event broker services.

As you can see, like the components of SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh explained a little earlier, the Cloud Console is divided into the same three building blocks:

1. Event Management: Here, the different event management services are available. For example, the Event Portal, through which you can create, design, share, and manage various aspects of your EDA, based on event brokers or other streaming technologies.
2. Event Streaming: Here, you can access the cluster and mesh managers, through which you can manage the event brokers and event meshes in your instance.
3. Event Insights: SAP integration Suite, advanced event mesh has dashboards and visualizations available out-of-the-box. With this, you can monitor the event brokers deployed.

Since all those components are equally important, they are discussed throughout this learning journey. The figure below intends to make the structure of the cloud console clearer:

Let’s start with the component Event Management.

Event Management includes the components "Designer", "Catalog", "Discovery", and "Event API product". They all belong to the "Event Portal".

The Event Portal within SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh, offers a single place where architects and developers can collaboratively catalog, share, create and manage all the events, schemes, and applications internal and external to the enterprise.

The event portal is essential for you in your work with SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh, as it helps you to manage all the stuff under the hood while you focus on business value. It does this by:

• Discovering and exposing key, high-value events for systematic adoption.
• Enabling collaboration between all the stakeholders within the organization.
• Enabling you to keep the agility and decoupling of EDA but without the chaos.
• Reusing events, which enables low cost of integration.

Here is, how it looks like, when all these influencing factors (like event brokers and events) and roles (like enterprise architect and developer) come together, under the hood of the Event Portal ("Solace PubSub+ Event Portal"):

The Catalog in Event Portal is a library that contains all objects and object versions. It includes:

• Applications
• Events
• Schemas
• Enumerations
• Event APIs
• Event API Products

Any objects created in Designer or imported using Runtime Event Manager are automatically accessible in Catalog. Users can view shared objects in all application domains and any objects within the application domains they have access to. If granted access to an application domain, users can open and update objects in Designer.

Let’s move on with the component "Event Streaming".

Here, Mission Control is where event brokers and event meshes are managed, and the health of your SAP Integration suite, advanced event mesh instance gets monitored. It includes Cluster Manager and Mesh Manager, which help you to create event broker services and manage your event mesh.

Within the Cluster Manager, you have different possibilities to scale the cluster as required. These include:

• Creating Event Broker Services: Create event broker services and set options.
• Cloning Event Broker Services: Create a clone of an existing service to deploy to other regions or expand your event mesh.
• Configuring Event Broker Services: Configure event broker service settings like names, connections, and log forwarding
• Access and Authentication: Manage who has access and how they authenticate
• Messaging: Configure, manage, and track messaging on your event broker services
• Deleting Event Broker Services: Delete event broker services you no longer need

Let’s look at an example for creating an Event Broker Service to get an understanding of the event broker service and how you can interact with it on SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh. As the event broker service provides the messaging capabilities to your client applications, the event broker service is the main object you interact with in AEM. The service can be created in different cloud providers, can be deployed to different regions, and can be part of a cluster and a mesh.

If you want to create an event broker service, you simply need to provide a name, a region, and the service type (service class). For a better understanding of this set up, take a look at the short tutorial below:

To correctly select the service class, you must understand and know the requirements of your client applications, for example the number of client applications connecting simultaneously, the maximum throughput, the number of queues required, and the type of traffic exchanged between client applications. If you want to learn more about how to choose the right service class, visit this documentation.

If you want to further investigate an event broker service available in your instance, you simply have to navigate to Mission Control, click on Cluster Manager and go to your event broker service. In the example here, this is the EU-North-Broker event broker service. As seen on the figure below, you will be provided with several parameters. In the Status tab of the service, you get an overall status of the event broker service, the number of active connections, the number of queues used, the state of the service, its version, when it was created, who created it, and also, if it is part of a high availability group. It also indicates if this specific event broker service is part of a mesh.

If you move on to the Connect tab, you can see the connection details available for the event broker service, depending on the protocol you want to use, for example, the host, port, username, and password to connect to the event broker service. Depending on the protocol you use to connect, you sometimes might need to provide Message VPN details. This is also included here, as seen on the screenshot below:

When moving on to the Manage tab of this event broker service, you can access the event broker service manager. From here, you can swiftly access the clients, queues, access control and bridge of your event broker. There, you can also easily see the different management tools available (see screenshot below):

After checking out the Manage tab, let’s take a look at the Monitoring tab of the event broker service. Here, you will be able to get a summary of the messages exchanged via your event broker:

Moving on to the next tab, the Configuration tab, you can see the service type (service class), the cloud provider and region where the event broker service is deployed, the upper limits of the event broker service, for example, the maximum number of client connections, the maximum number of queues possible, the messaging storage, and the maximum number of queue messages:

Lastly, let’s check out the Try Me! Tab of the event broker service. With this, you can see some event broker service metrics, for example, the number of active connections, guaranteed messaging endpoints, and network usage. Most importantly, you will be able to easily interact with the event broker service via the CodePen projects embedded in the web page. Through them, you can connect to the event broker, publish messages to it and also consume messages sent to topics. This is a great way to quickly test the event broker service and exchange simple messages.

Let’s check out the following short demo which uses the CodePen projects section to quickly establish a connection and exchange a message:

After you have gotten an understanding of the Cluster Manager within Mission Control of SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh, let’s dive deeper into the Mesh Manager within Mission Control.

Thus, with Mesh Manager, you can:

• See a visual representation of all your data centers on a map.
• Plan how to build your event mesh with event broker services in Mesh Manager.
• Navigate directly to the event broker services in an event mesh to see and configure them as required.
• Easily configure and validate your event mesh.

When you navigate to Mission control, and then click on Mesh Manager, you can view the event mesh available:

An event mesh can be created using Mesh Manager by connecting one DMR cluster to another, allowing for multi-site scaling. A DMR cluster may contain multiple event broker services, each which can be configured to be part of the same cluster. Within a DMR cluster, each event broker service, or node, connects to others in the cluster through DMR internal links, supporting horizontal scaling. One node serves as the gateway that connects to other DMR clusters through external DMR links, automatically configured by the Mesh Manager.

After the event mesh is created, it routes events from publishing applications to subscribing applications within each DMR cluster. The data is forwarded based on matching subscriptions. Furthermore, event broker services can be single node DMR clusters, each serving as a gateway to connect to other clusters. The configuration can be a full-mesh combination of different cloud providers and Kubernetes deployment, as you can see in the following figure:

Creating an event mesh with SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh, is quite simple, you just need to provide a name, select the event broker services that will be part of the mesh, and then specify the links between the event broker services. For a better understanding, let’s take a look at a short demo, where you can see how an event mesh is created (in this example the event mesh is called "EDI CodeJam"):

As you can see, the event broker services that are part of the mesh are visible, as well as the last time there was a sync and the status of all the links. From here, you also have the possibility to run a mesh health check.

Let’s move on to the last component of the Cloud Console, which is Event Insights.

Insights enables operations and applications teams to ensure their event broker service and event mesh infrastructure are available and ready for use by business applications, with centralized, at-a-glance status on the availability of various aspects, such as:

• Resource usage
• Event mesh health
• Message flow
• High-Availability (HA) status
• Queue, topic endpoint, RDP, and bridge health
• Message spool utilization
• Capacity utilization

Insights is a complete monitoring service that you can subscribe to. It can significantly enhance your comprehension of your estate, which refers to your usage of event broker services, the messages, and actions they generate and any features particular to your SAP Integration Suite account (Workspace). Insights grants the following benefits:

• Maintain the best performance of your applications and event broker services by monitoring key performance indicators (KPIs), metrics, and events. This way, you'll recognize usage and performance trends, and can be proactive in addressing any issues.
• Gain a deeper understanding of your application behavior and learn how to best scale your event broker services from a singular location. This tool lets you spot misconfigurations, monitor the flow of events across multiple applications, and keep track of the health of these applications or the performance of your event-driven architecture (EDA).

In addition, with Insights, you can:

• View account-level and service-level dashboards, get closer looks with Insights dashboards for Datadog, and even create custom monitors and dashboards to meet your company’s monitoring needs. Details on this feature can be found under Insights Visualizations and Dashboards. If you want to learn more about this, see: Insights Visualizations and Dashboards.
• Set up email alerts for any occurrences within your estate. More information can be found under Notifications .
• Examine event broker service logs and the comprehensive metrics collected by Insights. More information can be found under Logs and Metrics.
• Make use of Insights monitors for Datadog. These monitors utilize best practices and event monitoring expertise, you can apply them to custom dashboards you build. More information can be found under Insights Monitors for Datadog.

All metrics and logs are collected and stored by a centralized monitoring service, that's a part of Insights, named Datadog. This service also provides crucial visualizations through account-level and service-level dashboards accessible through the Cloud Console. The Insights dashboards available on Datadog provide advanced monitoring features that individual users within the advanced event mesh account may choose to enable.

In order to view the insights of your AEM instance, simply navigate to Event Insights, and then to Insights. You will see the following dashboard (with your individual information):

From here, you will also be able to access dashboards available in Datadog, if Insights Advanced Monitoring has been enabled. You can learn more about this in this documentation.

In June 2022, SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh was launched via the consumption-based licensing model, through CPEA credits or Pay-As-You-Go. Both methods are based on consumption of services, either hourly (event brokers) or monthly (deployment regions). The aforementioned capabilities of Event Streaming, Event Management, and Event Monitoring and Insights are always bundled into event brokers, while deployment regions allow flexible deployment and ownership options (more details in the documentation).