Complex event processing

CEP is used in operational intelligence (OI) products to provide insight into business operations by running query analysis against live feeds and event data. OI collects real-time data and correlates against historical data to provide insight and analysis. Multiple sources of data can be combined to provide a common operating picture that uses current information.

In network management, systems management, application management and service management, people usually refer instead to event correlation. As CEP engines, event correlation engines (event correlators) analyze a mass of events, pinpoint the most significant ones, and trigger actions. However, most of them do not produce new inferred events. Instead, they relate high-level events with low-level events.

Inference engines, e.g., rule-based reasoning engines, typically produce inferred information in artificial intelligence. However, they do not usually produce new information in the form of complex (i.e., inferred) events.