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Event Notification Best Practices

Overview

Event notifications (also known as event driven provisioning) are the means by which Aria interacts with your service delivery system(s), informing you of any creation/modification of accounts based on the events to which you have subscribed. This interaction provides timely and accurate data that allows you to make decisions about providing or discontinuing services to your customers.

You can have Aria send event notifications in the following formats:

  • Email message (SMTP - Simple Mail Transfer Protocol)
  • XML (Extensible Markup Language) document (via HTTP or secure HTTP - Hypertext Transfer Protocol)
  • Name-value pairs (via HTTP or secure HTTP)

In your Aria configuration, you can specify the events about which you want to receive notifications. You can also specify the email addresses and/or URLs on your network to which event notifications should be sent. Aria sends a notification almost as soon as your specified event occurs. Please note that performance may lag depending on the volume of transactions being processed.

If you have event notifications sent to you as XML documents, you may choose to work with XML document definition files that describe the structure of the data in the event notifications that Aria sends to your system(s). One XML document definition is available for each event class. These files are available in XSD (XML Schema Definition) format. You can validate the data in the XML documents against the applicable XSD file. You can download the XSD files for each event class on the pages linked to in the table below.

Event Class Categorization

Event Class Number

Event Class

Description

7

Accounts and Master Plan Instances

Events associated with the creation and modification of accounts and master plan instance records and their related data elements.

8

Orders

Events associated with the creation and modification of orders for inventory items.

9

Financial Transactions

Events associated with the creation of financial transactions on accounts and master plan instances.

10

Account Notifications

Events associated with the preparation and transmission of email messages to account holders, billing contacts, statement contacts, etc.
11 Usage Monitoring Events associated with usage on master plan instances.
12  Product Class Events associated with changes to plans and services. 

Best Practices

The recommended practices to follow to enhance your event notification workflow are described below:

Performance

  • Subscribe only to events that you need to be informed of. If you subscribe to a large number of events that you don’t require, that may slow down your Aria implementation.
  • You can set up an unlimited number of destinations (endpoints) for your notifications. All notifications within an event class you subscribed to go to all destinations within that class. You may want to consider whether all of the destinations are necessary since a large number of destinations may slow down your Aria implementation.
  • Decide whether an event notification is actually needed immediately based on the actions you need to take based on the notification. You may want to consider getting an extract of your chosen Aria data instead of using event notifications, then taking action based on the data.

    Example: You can wait for invoices to be generated then extract invoice data for import into your financial system.
     
  • If you specify that Aria should make more than one attempt to send an event notification:
    • Set the delay between attempts to at least 300 seconds. This allows enough time for Aria to attempt another transmission and for your server to send back a response.
    • It is highly recommended that you set the delay between attempts to 900 seconds and specify 9 attempts. This will give you around 2 hours to resolve any issues with your system that may be preventing you from receiving event notifications.

 

Security

  • The SMTP (email) and HTTP methods are not secure and are therefore not recommended methods for transmitting event notifications.
  • Secure HTTP is the recommended method for transmitting event notifications.
  • Send your event notification data to only trusted parties. Sending data to third parties may compromise the privacy of your customers’ information.
  • Restrict access to the Event Notifications section in the Aria application to only authorized individuals.

 

Monitoring/Enhancement

  • In addition to using the event notification logs to monitor your event notifications, you can consider doing the following to ensure that your notifications are being sent as expected:
    • Add the Provisioning Events by Date report to your report catalog. You can then schedule that report using your chosen criteria.
    • Monitor the destination (examples: server or inbox) that you set up to receive notifications to make sure it is up and running.
    • Create alerts that will inform you if you have not received a notification from Aria over an expected period of time based on your typical account activity.
  • If you need to send a notification to different destinations depending on the content of the notification, Aria recommends that you:
    • set up 1 destination for that notification; and
    • configure Aria Workflow or your own custom application to:
      • optionally update or format the notification; then
      • redirect that notification from the destination to the applicable location or recipient.
  • Since you cannot add information to Aria's event notification data, you can use API calls to enhance the data.

    Examples:
    • if you subscribed to an invoice-related event, you can get the invoice details using an API;
    • if you subscribed to a plan change event, you can get the plan details using an API.

 

Preconditions

To use event notifications, you must first take these actions, described in detail in Event Notification Prerequisites:

  • accept the Aria IP address range;
  • configure your provisioning settings;
  • set up XSD schema files;
  • set up VIE (Virtual Inventory Engine) for virtual inventory;
  • enable XML statements.

 

Process Overview 

After completing the Event Notification Prerequisites, perform these tasks to implement your event notification process:

 

Use Cases

Click on any of the links below to see instructions for working with a few key scenarios involving event notifications:

 

Note: A few common event notifications are provided above for demonstration purposes. Please click on the link in the Event Class column in the table above for a complete list of available event notifications that you can work with.

 

Subtopics

Aria Crescendo Developer’s Guide

Event Notification Process Overview
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