Create an IBM Cloud account

If you don't have an IBM Cloud account, create one.

Decide on a location

Decide on a location where your service will to be hosted. Currently, the following locations are supported:

• Dallas (us-south)
• London (eu-gb)
• Frankfurt (eu-de)
• Sydney (au-syd)
• Madrid (eu-es)
• Toronto (ca-tor)
• Tokyo (jp-tok)
• Osaka (jp-osa)
• Sao Paulo (br-sao)
• Montreal (ca-mon)
• Washington DC (us-east)
• Chennai (in-che)
• Mumbai (in-mum)

Decide on a pricing plan

Based on your business requirements, decide on a pricing plan. Currently, the following plans are available: Lite, and Standard.

• Lite: This plan gives you unlimited ingested events, 10 topics, two filters per topic, five destinations, 20 outbound emails, 20 outbound SMSes, 20 outbound webhooks (including Slack, with a limit of 20 Slack messages), and 1000 notifications per push destination (cumulative per instance, including Android, iOS, Huawei devices, and Chrome, Firefox, Safari browsers; the instance is disabled once the limit is reached). Ten subscriptions are allowed, and a subscription can have a maximum of three email recipients.

  Custom Email and Custom SMS destinations are not supported by Lite Plan.

• Standard: You are charged for ingested events and for outbound digital messages. An ingested event is one that is received and filtered. If a source is connected but no filters are defined for it (that is, the source is not associated with any topic), the incoming events are dropped, and you are not charged. Outbound digital messages come in various types, and each type is priced separately.

  You can use Pre-production destination, as a low-cost push destination, for your development and test environments. You can change the Pre-production destination to Production destination post completion of your development and testing. This feature is only available for Standard pricing plan.

Changing plans from a chargeable plan (Standard) to free plan (Lite) is not permitted as this may result in disruption and data loss due to the plan limitations.

Choose an event source

You can create either an API Source or an IBM Cloud source. To learn more about the process of adding a source, see Adding an Event Notifications source.

An API source indicates that the Event originated outside of IBM Cloud and is sent to Event Notifications service through API calls.

An IBM Cloud source indicates a service on IBM Cloud that can emit events to Event Notifications service.

The source IBM Cloud Resource Lifecycle Events is a built-in source. This source emits resource lifecycle events to Event Notifications service. This is disabled by default and must be enabled.

The other IBM Cloud sources must be first integrated to start emitting events to Event Notifications service.

For the full list of supported IBM Cloud sources, see Registering event sources.

Choose an event destination

A destination is a delivery target for a notification. Two destination categories are supported:

• Human destinations are devices, servers, or applications that present notifications for human consumption.
• Service destinations are cloud services or applications where notifications are consumed programmatically.

For the full list of supported destinations, see Working with event destinations.

To learn more about the process of creating a destination, see Creating an Event Notifications destination.

Route notifications to destinations flow

Event routing connects your sources to your destinations through topics, filters, and subscriptions.

• A topic organizes incoming events from one or more sources. Each source is connected to a topic through a user-defined filter.
• Filters define which events from each source are routed to the topic.
• A subscription connects a topic to a destination, so that matching events are delivered to the right people or services.

To set up event routing, see Route notifications to destinations flow.

After you save the routing configuration, notifications are delivered to the chosen destinations whenever a matching event occurs.

Subscriptions are created and managed as part of the route notifications to destinations flow. They are not available as a standalone option from the navigation menu on the Event Notifications instance page.

To create or modify a subscription, you must work through a topic:

• New topic: If you have not created a topic yet, create one. You can add subscriptions to the new topic as part of the same guided flow.
• Existing topic: If a topic already exists, edit it to add or modify subscriptions.

Alternative: Use Terraform

As an alternative to the console, you can provision and configure Event Notifications instances by using Terraform IBM Modules (TIM) for Infrastructure as Code (IaC) automation. The TIM for Event Notifications provides a standardized, tested, and enterprise-ready approach that follows IBM Cloud security best practices.