Event Notifications concepts

Event

An occurrence of something of interest that is associated with IBM Cloud platform or services and apps that run on it.

Event notification

A digitized message that is triggered when an event occurs. Event notifications come in to the Event Notifications service from event sources. Sometimes "event notification" is shortened to "event" or "notification" in the context of the Event Notifications service.

Event source

A service or application on IBM Cloud that emits event notifications and publishes them to a topic within the Event Notifications service. A source is a registered entity in an Event Notifications service instance. Several services on IBM Cloud are set to be integrated to send notifications to Event Notifications.

IBM Cloud Monitoring, IBM Cloud Security and Compliance Center, IBM Cloud Secrets Manager Platform Notifications for IBM Cloud, IBM Cloud Resource Lifecycle Events, IBM Cloud Projects, and Toolchain are enabled. A source can publish to multiple topics. In other contexts sources are identified as producers or publishers.

Size limit for a send notification request is limited to 64 KB.

Filter

A mechanism for selectively passing event notifications from a source into a topic. A topic has an independent filter for each source that is connected to it.

Ingested event notification

• An event notification that is evaluated by a filter. Ingested events are a primary billing metric. The price for ingested events is the same for all sources. If no filter is defined for a source, none of the events from that source are ingested.

• If a filter is defined for a source but no event notifications are passed through, the number of notifications that bounced are still considered "ingested" because they were analyzed by a filter.

Topic

• A landing place for filtered events. Topics hold a set of incoming event notifications of interest. Each source is connected to a topic through a user-defined filter. Notifications that pass into a topic are pushed to all subscribed destinations. A topic can connect to multiple sources.

• Event notifications that end up in a topic are routed to destinations. A topic can be connected to multiple sources. Although topics are innately coupled to sources by using filters, they are not innately coupled to destinations. That coupling happens through subscriptions.

Destination

A delivery target for Event Notifications. In other contexts, destinations are also called channels, sinks, consumers, or subscribers.

• Human destination: A device, server, or application presents notifications for human consumption. Examples of human destinations are email servers, SMS text providers, and push notification services.

  Specific email addresses, phone numbers, and device IDs can be part of a subscription to a destination, but they are not part of the destination itself.

• Service destinations: A cloud service or an application where notifications are consumed programmatically. A webhook to a backend microservice is an example of a service destination.

Subscription

An association of one topic to one destination. If a destination requires additional information to operate correctly (for example, email addresses for an email destination), then that information is included in the subscription.

Subscriber

An entity that is targeted by a subscription. For webhooks, the webhook host is the subscriber. For human destinations, email addresses and phone numbers (or the people who own them) are subscribers.

One subscription can have only one destination, but it can have many subscribers within that destination. 

Outbound digital message

An event notification that is sent from the Event Notifications service to a subscriber. Outbound digital messages are a primary billing metric for the Event Notifications service. The price for outbound digital messages varies by destination (for example, outbound digital messages to SMS are priced differently than outbound digital messages to email). In most cases a dispatch (attempt to deliver) is considered an outbound digital message, regardless of whether the delivery was successfully.

Digital message origin

The originating phone number or origin ID for a text message, and the originating domain or IP address for email. In, most countries the sender is obligated by law to be transparent about the origin of a digital message. If you select the IBM SMS Service or IBM Email Service as a destination for your subscriptions, the text messages that user receives has an origin that is owned by IBM.

SMS message

A text message in Simple Messaging Service format.