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1.3 Overview

Complex event processing (CEP) is the continuous and incremental processing of event (data) streams from multiple sources based on declarative query and pattern specifications with near-zero latency. The goal is to identify meaningful patterns, relationships, and data abstractions from among seemingly unrelated events and to trigger immediate response actions. For more information, see [MSDN-MPCEP].

Typical event stream sources include data from manufacturing applications, financial trading applications, web analytics, and operational analytics.

The CEP engine provides a dedicated web service to handle requests from client applications for managing the system. Using the protocol described in this document, applications issue instructions to the CEP engine to create, start, and stop queries, and to inquire about query status and other parameters that describe the health of a running CEP engine. The protocol also supports messages that are used to enable and disable specific performance counters and event tracing.

The CEPM protocol is used to communicate with the web service that is provided by the CEP engine to define and manage all of the CEP system’s objects. As soon as all of the objects are defined and in place in the CEP engine, a protocol message to start the query causes the CEP engine to tap into the streaming data and to calculate and send output data. Another such message will stop the engine from recording and computing data. The CEPM protocol is used to create and manage the following objects:

The CEPM protocol is stateless. All communication is initiated by the client. The server only sends responses in response to messages received. The following figure shows the methods available in this protocol.

CEPM web service protocol showing the available methods

Figure 1: CEPM web service protocol showing the available methods