This is mostly a very basic “getting started” guide for AEM set up. As an admin, you can do most of these steps. If you are not an admin, you will require support from your Global Account Admin to set things up for you.

Table of Contents

  1. Table of Contents
  2. Enable SAP AEM in services
  3. Understanding homepage layout
  4. Mission Control
    1. Cluster Manager
    2. Mesh Manager
  5. Event Portal
    1. Designer
    2. Catalog
    3. Runtime Event Manager
    4. KPI
  6. Event Insights
  7. Conclusion

Enable SAP AEM in services

The first step would be to enable SAP AEM in services section.

You will also need an identity provider and establish trust in “Trust Configuration”.

Once you have the basic BTP Cockpit steps done (if required with the support of AEM team), you are good to launch it.

As soon as you start the application as shown below:

You will be prompted to select you identity provider and provide credentials, after that you will be at the home page of AEM as shown below:

Understanding homepage layout

It is broken into 3 sections:
1. Mission Control
2. Event Portal
3. Event Insights

Lets go over each section briefly and underlying steps you need to do to create an initial mesh. But lets go over our objective which we will accomplish by end of this blog.

Objective:

Create a mesh of two brokers, where an event published on one broker, also gets published on the other broker. We will publish a basic test event on one broker and subscribe and receive it on the second broker.

Mission Control

This will be your starting point as a developer or someone who is doing the intial configuration. Here we will create the two brokers as outlined in the objective.

Your Mission Control panel is comprised of two portals: Cluster Manager and Mesh Manager.

Cluster Manager

This is a portal which lists all the services/brokers you have created. You can filter it by the user who has created it or view them all, as we will see now.

Here First we will Create a service and the broker.

A “service” is a “broker service” in AEM context, hosted on an infrastrcture of your choice. To create the two brokers, you will create two services. The services are hyperscaler and you can choose one of the service providers out of GCP, AWS and Azure.

To Create a service Click on “Create Service” button on top right corner.

On next page, First give you service a name and then make the selection for an “Enterprise” grade service with more features or a “Standard” one:

Next Select your cloud service provider from drop down:

Select the region where you want to host this service (broker):

You can leave the other options default for now and click on “Create Service” button on Bottom Right.

Repeat same steps for rthe second service (broker). You can host it in a different region altogether to visualize a case for global EDA.

After you have created the service, your “Cluster Manager” page will look like below:

You can select any service and check out its parameters by selecting different tabs on the ribbon:

Connect:

You will have supported library and protocol related parameter details which you can use in your application to establish connection to broker service (e.g. in SM59) or use in your application depending on the language in which it is written.

As seen below you have host username and password if you chose to connect with AMQP or REST.

Similary, based on language support you are seeking, you can check below:

Manage

Under manage tab you can manage below parts of your mesh:

  1. Message VPN
  2. Clients
  3. Queues
  4. Access control
  5. Bridges
  6. Additional
    6.1 Delete a service
    6.2 Broker management tools

Monitoring

In monitoring section you can view broker traffic and usage i.e. resource utilization.

Configuration

General highlights of the infrastructure related settings of the service, in addition to default broker settings and max clients supported.

Try Me!

It is a tab for you to simulate and verify whether publishing and subscribing features of your broker settings are working as expected.

Below you can see, I tried to simulate a simple “Hello World” text on to the topic called “Try-me” and on right side, I added same topic as subscription so when I publish this text, I see it being populated on right right side as well.

Note:

About “Try me!” page, this is very helpful to verify if some setting inside AEM is wrong. It is a neat tool to test you mesh. You can try to publish a message on “Broker service 1” on a topic “XYZ”, if “Broker service 2” is connected to “Broker servide 1” in an event mesh, You can see the message being populated on right side of the “Try me!” page in realtime.

Mesh Manager

This is a portal which lists all the meshs you have created. You can create mulitple mesh where each mesh is comprised of certain broker services. Mesh is made of interconnected Clusters.

Here you can see how a mesh looks by visualization according to location of broker host. You can expand further by checking, how events flow between clusters in a mesh.

Event Portal

This portal is repository and design time of all the events we plan to work with. You can import event definitions here or create those in designer.

This portal is comprised of below portal:

Designer

As the name suggest, it is “Designer” for how your application with interact or work over the broker.

You create/import “Application Domain(s)” which is logical parent object of a group of similar goal oriented applications, events, schemas, and other related objects.

Each “Application” inside an “Application Domain” object is a representation of certain action or activity.

You an Create, edit, update each item based on your requirement.

Catalog

Catalog is nothing but a collection of everything created in designer. Here you can search for various schemas, events, applications across all application domains. You can see some stats on each object as well, like number of events published or subscriber count.

You can see topic for each type of event as well.

Runtime Event Manager

Runtime Event manager is a great tool to visualize a mesh in terms of “Event” network. Here you can “Model a mesh” by clicking the button on top right “Create Modeled Event Mesh”. You can add multiple brokers to a model to see the event architecture.

Below, you can see one “Mesh model” is created which contains two broker services which we created earlier. You can create numerous Models but note that you cannot have one broker in two different models, the wizard itself will not allow it.

If you open the model, you will will see below map of event network / architecture, which shows how they are flowing from broker to broker.

KPI

This just a front to measure the performance of each type of event against volume and subscriber related data. It can further give you insights if you can reuse certain events across the brokers.

Event Insights

As name suggests it gives you insights into what is happening with your broker services and whether there is some issue with them, or are they unused for last 24 hours. The insights can help you optimize your architecture and save on costs.

Conclusion

As a beginner you will not use each and every checkbox, button or feature out there on the portal. This blog was to get you familiar with the portal nevertheless. Next blogs will guide you to the “essentials” of understanding AEM.

See you in next blog then…