Creating an Event Notifications source

Various services produce events that can be consumed by Event Notifications. You can add these services as sources within your Event Notifications instance. When a source is created, you can filter the events from it by using topics, and then subscribe destinations to the topics.

If you do not have an existing instance, create one from the IBM Cloud catalog.

Types of sources

There are four types of sources that are supported for Event Notifications: IBM Cloud sources, generic API sources, IBM Cloud platform sources, and the Periodic Timer.

With IBM Cloud sources, events emit from managed services on IBM Cloud. For example, IBM Cloud Monitoring and IBM Cloud Secrets Manager can be added as sources. For a full list of supported sources, see IBM Cloud sources.

With generic API sources, events emanate from services or applications that are not managed by IBM. For example, if you create your own application that sends events to Event Notifications, your application can be added as an API source.

API sources cannot route notifications to the IBM Cloud email service and IBM Cloud SMS service because these services deliver content that is generated exclusively from IBM Cloud managed services.

By default, IBM Cloud Resource lifecycle events are provided as a source and are disabled. You can enable it if you want to monitor the IBM Cloud Resource lifecycle events, which incurs additional charges. IBM Cloud Resource lifecycle events are events around the IBM Cloud resources like instance creation, updating an instance, deleting an instance and other events related to IBM Cloud resources.

The Periodic Timer source is also provided as a default source. It is used to schedule events based on a period that you define. It is disabled by default and you can enable it to schedule events periodically.

To see the current list of IBM Cloud services available as Event Notifications sources, click Sources in your Event Notifications instance, click Create, and select IBM Cloud sources.

The connection protocols differ between source types, so the procedure for adding is different as described in the following sections.

To integrate a source with Event Notifications, an instance of that source also needs to be created.

Creating a source

To create a new source:

  1. Verify that the IBM Cloud service is available as a source for Event Notifications.

    1. Click Sources in your Event Notifications instance.
    2. Click Create in the Sources section.
    3. Select IBM Cloud source in the Create source dialog.
    4. Confirm that the managed service of interest is displayed.

  2. Create a service-to-service authorization between your IBM Cloud service and Event Notifications.

    • In the IBM Cloud console, click Manage > Access (IAM) > Authorizations.
    • Select your IBM Cloud service as the source, and Event Notifications as the target from the authorization view.
    • Set the service access level to Event Source Manager.

  3. Find your existing service instances in your account resource list and select the instance of interest to open it.

Creating a generic API source

API sources cannot be used to send notifications to out-of-the-box destinations like email and SMS.

  1. Click Sources in your Event Notifications instance.
  2. Click Create in the Sources section.
  3. Select API Source in the Create source dialog.
  4. Enter a name and an optional description and click Create source.

Follow the instructions in the Event Notifications API documentation, or in the SDK documentation for your programming language to configure the connection as you are connecting from your own application or service.