Glossary · System coordination, integration and orchestration
Event routing
Also known as: message routing
German: Ereignisrouting
In event-driven systems, event routing is the forwarding of events from their sources to the consumers or channels that should receive them, based on topics, subscriptions, event types or event content.
- System integration
In one sentence
Event routing forwards events from their sources to the right consumers or channels based on topics, subscriptions, types or content.
Example
Alarm events with priority 1 are routed to the control room HMI and the on-call pager, while lower-priority events go only to the historian.
How it applies
- Architecture: Routing can happen in a broker through topics and subscriptions, in an integration layer through rules, or in consumers that filter what they receive. Keep routing where it can be seen and changed centrally.
- Engineering: Define what happens to events that no consumer receives: dead-letter queues or alerts prevent silent loss.
- Documentation: Maintain a routing overview (event types, routes, receivers). When routing affects alarms or notifications to people, document it in the alarm management documentation as well, since missed routes can mean missed alarms.
Event routing vs. content-based routing
Event routing is the general task. Content-based routing is one way of doing it, where the route depends on fields inside the event rather than on its topic or type.