Connecting App Connect Enterprise to Event Endpoint Management

October 20th, 2023

Configuring IBM App Connect Enterprise to consume messages from Kafka topics in IBM Event Endpoint Management requires careful configuration. In this post, I’ll share the steps I use that help me to avoid missing any required values.

If this sounds familiar, it might be because I wrote a post like this about using App Connect Enterprise to work with topics from Event Streams. People seem to have found that post useful, so I thought I’d do something similar for topics in Event Endpoint Management this time.

To illustrate this, I’ll create a simple App Connect flow that consumes messages from a Kafka topic and publish them to an MQTT topic.

The key to getting this to work correctly first time is to make sure that values are accurately copied from Event Endpoint Management to App Connect.

To help with this, I use a grid like the one below.

The instructions in this post start with Event Endpoint Management, and explain how to populate the grid with the information you need.

Then the instructions will switch to App Connect, and explain how to use the values in the grid to set up your App Connect flow.

What this is Values you will see in my screenshots Your value
A Topic name
DEMO.ACE
B Bootstrap address
my-eem-gateway-ibm-egw-rt-event-automation.apps.dalelane.cp.fyre.ibm.com:443
C SASL mechanism
PLAIN
D SASL config
org.apache.kafka.common.security.plain.PlainLoginModule required;
E Security protocol
SASL_SSL
F Certificate
eem-cert.jks
G Certificate password
STOREPASSW0RD
H Username
eem-9c8fc5d9-fddd-48dd-ab41-e062214166e5
I Password
dd08a1fc-99be-4931-8059-70aef88c1f0c
J Policy project name
demo-policies
K Policy name
demo-eem-policy
L Security identity name
eem-credentials
M Truststore identity name
eem-truststore

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Understanding windows in Event Processing

October 11th, 2023

Event Processing (one of the new capabilities of IBM Event Automation) makes it easy to perform stateful processing of streams of events from Kafka topics. In this post, I want to drill down a little into how windowed processing behaves.

I’ve enjoyed the chance to see the solutions that people have started to build with the tool. As part of this, I’ve been helping several people to understand the results produced by the event processing flows they’ve made.

These often started with different questions, such as:

  • Why hasn’t my flow produced any results?
  • Why isn’t my one-minute window producing one result every minute?
  • Why did the last one event on my Kafka topic cause results to be produced for several different windows?
  • etc.

However, these are often symptoms of a single common question: how windowed processing operations behave.

I’ve tried to come up with simple ways to demonstrate how it works, so in this post I want to share how I’m currently explaining it.


youtu.be/x_r6GNZmsd4

My office “pet”

September 8th, 2023

I have a first-floor office by a large window. On the outside of the window is a wide ledge. And a few weeks ago, a couple of pigeons started assembling a nest of twigs on the ledge by my desk.

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MQTT extension for Scratch

August 5th, 2023

screenshot

Extensions in Scratch let you add additional blocks to the palette. I’ve written about how to create extensions before, but in this post I want to share my latest extension which adds MQTT support.

I don’t have a particular Scratch project in mind for this yet, but publishing and subscribing to an MQTT broker from a Scratch project would allow multiple web browsers each running Scratch to communicate with each other. I’m sure there are some fun things this could be used for.

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Trying new things

July 27th, 2023

I’m a fan of trying unusual things. In this post, I thought I’d share some examples of things I’ve done in the last year or so, in case it gives you an idea of something you might want to try.

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Catching the carpool cheats

July 24th, 2023

I’ve added a new project worksheet to Machine Learning for Kids, based on the idea of a traffic camera in a carpool lane.

Students create training examples by labelling pictures of cars with random passengers in.


recording of creating the training examples at youtu.be/KtDrKcAwECU

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My TEDx talk

July 24th, 2023

The videos from TEDx Winchester 2023 are now live on YouTube – including a recording of my talk. This feels like a good point to look at back at what the experience was like.


youtu.be/m6dyCRS8EmI

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Walking to work

July 21st, 2023

My commute changed a few weeks ago – from a short drive, to a cross-country walk. I had to return my company car as we don’t do them any more, and I chose not to replace it. So now I’m starting and ending my day with a walk.


youtu.be/c1n1t0JaNa0

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