What is Event Streaming?

An event is defined as a change in state such as a transaction or a prospect navigating to your website. Businesses want to be able to react to these crucial business moments in real time. Traditional data processing is no longer viable in today’s world of real time enabled systems. Because collecting information, storing it in a relational database or Hadoop cluster, and running queries on it to discover meaningful events allows the opportunity to automate decisions and actions. Businesses need real-time reactivity and even proactive approaches to remain competitive.

Event-processing programs aggregate information from distributed systems in real time, applying rules that reveal key patterns, relationships or trends. An “event stream” is a sequence of business events ordered by time. With event stream processing you connect to all data sources and normalize, enrich and filter the data. You can then begin to correlate events and over time you see patterns emerge that describe events you care about. You add contextual data to ensure proper interpretation of events and then you apply real-time business logic and rules or machine learning to trigger action.

Action could mean invoking an app or starting a process, storing data in a persistent ledger or streaming data to a dashboard. And, with machine learning as an option you can not only identify the next best action but continually learn and improve business rules. The key to successful event stream processing is processing events in real time to identify the next best action. Learning and improving in a continuous loop.

Event streaming platforms process the inbound data while it is in flight, as it streams through the server. It performs ultra-fast, continuous computations against high-speed streaming data, and uses a continuous query engine that drives real time alerts and actions as well as live, user-configured visualizations. Event stream processing can make sense of vast amounts of data arriving at great velocity into your business to help filter out what’s important so you can automate processes and respond to important events in real time.