Who'd have thought it... I learned something new today

I'm in Germany at an internal education session at our Boeblingen laboratory.

More and more of our products are adding support for "CEI". I've been hearing a lot recently about IBM's CEI. This is not the same as Wikipedia's CEI, I should add. It is the Common Event Infrastructure. It embodies all kinds of cool things but one of the most immediately exciting is the idea of correlating events and errors from multiple products.

Example: your integration engine just failed to synchronise a new user from a CRM system into Billing. It throws an error to the customer who is connected via a portal. The App Server has an error in its log, the integration engine has another one. Perhaps the billing system has one. That was caused by a database rollback. But it turns out that was caused by a network problem preventing access to the SAN.

Previously, debugging this kind of thing could be a nightmare (even with a really well implemented solution).

CEI is one of the foundation technologies for turning these problems into something solvable.