{"id":5072,"date":"2024-03-13T20:58:05","date_gmt":"2024-03-13T20:58:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/?p=5072"},"modified":"2026-04-02T17:37:44","modified_gmt":"2026-04-02T17:37:44","slug":"getting-demo-events-onto-ibm-event-streams-topics-in-a-hurry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/?p=5072","title":{"rendered":"Getting demo events onto IBM Event Streams topics in a hurry"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sharing a couple of tips for quick-and-dirty demo setups.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I often need to put together demos of IBM Event Automation<\/a> without much notice. The starting point is almost always needing to get a bunch of interesting events onto a Kafka topic. <\/p>\n

What I need is a jumping-off point to illustrate the benefit of sharing streams of events in Event Endpoint Management<\/strong>, or the types of processing you can do in Event Processing<\/strong>. And to do that, I need a topic with events on them that will look interesting or relevant to who I’m demo’ing to. <\/p>\n

If I’ve got time to do this properly, I’ll setup a generator that will give me a continuous stream of randonly-generated events (example<\/a>). But if I’m in a hurry, I’ll use the REST Producer API<\/a> and do something like this instead.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Step 1 :
Get the URL for the REST Producer API<\/h3>\n

You can find this in the status section of the Event Streams custom resource. Or you can find it in the Event Streams admin UI. <\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Step 2 :
Get credentials to use with the REST Producer API<\/h3>\n

You can do this by creating a KafkaUser custom resource. Or you can click on the Generate credentials<\/strong> button in the Event Streams UI next to the Producer endpoint URL. <\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Choose SCRAM username and password<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Choose Produce messages<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Name the topic you will be producing demo messages to.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Copy the username and password that is displayed. <\/p>\n

Step 3 :
Get some test data – one event per line<\/h3>\n

There are loads of sites that will generate random data. <\/p>\n

Mockaroo<\/strong><\/a> is a good example – it generates random values for fields with different types, and will let you download all of that to a file.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

What you need to do will depend on which site you pick, but in general you choose a few fields, decide what names to give them, and get the site to generate random values for them.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

In this example, I’m generating JSON data, and by unticking the array checkbox I get jsonlines<\/a> data (that is, one file with lots of JSON objects, one JSON object per line).<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Step 4 :
Run this shell script<\/h3>\n

It just needs to read the file a line at a time, using curl<\/code> to POST each line to the Producer API.<\/p>\n