Monitoring AEM Asset Updates with Adobe I/O Events

Adobe I/O Events is part of the Adobe I/O platform. It allows developers to build event-driven experiences, applications, and custom workflows using Adobe platforms.

I wanted to create a simple application that shows the power of Adobe I/O Events. Updated asset notification is a very common use case, so I built an application that takes Adobe Experience Manager Asset updates and pushes them into a channel on Slack, with Adobe IO Events as the bridge.

This animation shows the app in action:

Add a new asset in the DAM and see the message appear in your Slack!

You can easily tailor this application to help you monitor and log all activities in your AEM Digital Asset Management (DAM). For example, you could build an individual RSS feed for author updates to the DAM assets created in the past week. You could initiate an approval workflow notification updating a workflow. Or, you could even query all pages that use one particular asset and send it to the author for a resolution check.
Architecture Diagram

Now that you’ve seen the app, let’s talk technicalities. There are four major components in this demo: my local AEM Instance, Adobe I/O, a webhook, and Slack:

App architecture diagram
When an asset event (asset created, modified, or deleted) happens in my AEM instance, the Cloud Service Provider pushes an event update to Adobe I/O. Adobe I/O processes that update, find all the integrations that subscribe to this event provider, and forwards that event update to all registered customer webhooks. Upon receiving that event update, my webhook (which is deployed on Heroku) runs the update through a workflow to determine what kind of event update it is, constructs an appropriate message, and pushes it to Slack.

Resources: Set up AEM Events with Adobe I/O