Solace Event Portal: Designing, Cataloguing and Governing Events

Solace Event Portal is a cloud-based tool for designing, cataloguing and governing the events that flow through an event-driven system. Architects model which applications publish and subscribe to which events, on which topics and with which payload schemas; developers find those events in a searchable catalogue; and the portal can push matching configuration to brokers and audit what is actually running against the design. It was called PubSub+ Event Portal until the May 2025 rename, and Solace’s product page sums it up as “Design, govern, and grow your event-driven system”.

This page explains the problem Event Portal solves, its object model and tools, how it handles Kafka, how a plant could use it as a data dictionary, and its limits. For the company and the rest of the portfolio, start at the Solace hub.

What problem Solace Event Portal solves

Event-driven systems are easy to start and hard to see. A REST API has a URL and usually a document. An event stream is a topic string that someone chose years ago, published by an application nobody wants to touch, consumed by an unknown number of others. After a few years, three questions become hard to answer: which events exist, who uses them, and what breaks if one changes.

An event catalogue answers them. It is the equivalent of an API catalogue for asynchronous interfaces. Gartner has advised making “events, topics and schemas discoverable and governable” (as summarised by Solace), and Event Portal is Solace’s product for that job. The vendor-neutral side of the idea is on our AsyncAPI guide.

It is design time, not runtime. Event Portal does not carry messages. The Solace Event Broker does. Event Portal holds the model of what should be flowing, and compares it with what is.

The Solace Event Portal object model

Event Portal organises everything into a small set of versioned objects (Event Portal overview).

Object	What it represents	Plant example (illustrative)
Application domain	A namespace for a team, group or line of business	“Packaging operations” or “Quality”
Application	A program that publishes or subscribes to events	The MES, a line historian connector, a quality app
Event	A kind of message on a topic, with a schema	batch/completed for a filler line
Schema	The payload structure, for example JSON Schema or Avro	Batch ID, product code, quantity, timestamps
Enumeration	A controlled list of values used in topic levels	Site codes, line names, machine states
Event API	A curated package of events with publish or subscribe operations	“Line performance events” for analytics
Event API Product	Event APIs bundled with plans for consumers (Beta)	A partner or supplier-facing data product

Versions and lifecycle states. Objects use semantic versions and move through lifecycle states that Solace describes as running from “draft through production and on to deprecation and retirement”. That is what lets a team change a schema without breaking the consumers still on the old version.

Environments and modeled event meshes represent the runtime. Solace’s docs say “each modeled event mesh represents the event flows through one or more event brokers in a specific runtime environment”, for example development, test and production.

The tools inside Event Portal

Tool	What it does	Added or noted
Designer	Create and model applications, events, schemas and enumerations; generates AsyncAPI from approved models	Core
Catalog	Searchable library of all objects, with schemas and producer and consumer relationships (docs)	Core
Runtime Event Manager	Models what is running on brokers, using discovered data; templates for queue configuration	Core
KPI Dashboard	Metrics on the event-driven system, such as reuse	Accelerate package
AI Design Assistant	Optional help drafting designs	April 2026
MCP server	Exposes Event Portal assets to AI coding assistants and agents	2026
Deployment approvals	Request, approve and promote configuration changes	1 September 2026

Solace’s product page adds automatic broker configuration: Event Portal “automatically applies the right broker setup for every environment by configuring all subscriptions, ACLs, queues and other broker artefacts”. That is the feature that closes the loop between a design and a running broker.

The event lifecycle in Solace Event Portal

Solace’s docs describe two ways to start: design-first, building the model before the applications, and discover-first, importing what already runs. Most established estates are discover-first, because the events already exist.

An event catalogue as a plant data dictionary

Most plants already have a data dictionary of some kind: a historian tag list, a spreadsheet of MES interfaces, a unified namespace topic tree on a whiteboard. Event Portal is one way to make that dictionary formal and versioned.

An illustrative scenario: a manufacturer with four plants has built a unified namespace at each site, and the topic trees have drifted. Plant one publishes site1/packaging/line3/oee; plant three publishes PLANT3/Pack/L3/OEE. A catalogue with an enumeration for site codes and a standard event for “line performance” gives the corporate analytics team one definition to build against, and gives each plant a target when they next touch the topic design. The design rules themselves are covered on Solace topics and wildcards, and the concept is explained in our unified namespace guide.

Who owns it matters more than which tool. An application domain per function, an owner per event, and a review step before a schema version is released are what turn a catalogue into governance. That is integration work rather than software, and it is where most of the effort goes in any IT/OT integration programme.

Kafka and other brokers

Event Portal is not limited to Solace brokers. The open-source Event Management Agent discovers Apache Kafka and Confluent topics and consumer groups, Confluent Schema Registry schemas, and Amazon MSK, according to its GitHub page. For an enterprise that runs Kafka for analytics and Solace for operational messaging, one catalogue across both is a practical argument. The relationship between the two products is covered on Solace and Kafka integration.

How Solace Event Portal compares with other ways to catalogue events

Event Portal is not the only way to answer “which events exist and who uses them”. The options differ in how much they know about the runtime.

• A wiki or spreadsheet. Free and familiar, and accurate on the day it is written. Nothing checks it against the brokers, so it drifts.
• AsyncAPI files in a Git repository. Vendor-neutral, reviewable through pull requests, and readable by the AsyncAPI project’s tools. Discovery, broker configuration and the relationship map are yours to build.
• A schema registry. Confluent Schema Registry or the Solace Schema Registry governs payload formats at runtime, but does not record which applications produce or consume an event.
• API management platforms. Several gateway vendors now catalogue asynchronous APIs alongside REST, and Solace announced a partnership with Kong in February 2026 aimed at a single control plane for APIs and events.

In our view, Event Portal’s distinguishing point is the closed loop: one model that generates AsyncAPI, configures Solace brokers and is audited against Solace and Kafka at runtime. If your estate is mostly Solace, that loop is worth evaluating. If it is mostly another broker, the Git-and-AsyncAPI route may serve you as well at lower cost.

Solace Event Portal packages

Solace publishes no prices. Its pricing page places Event Portal features across the three packages:

• Foundation: Designer and Catalog
• Accelerate: KPI Dashboard, self-service access, and import, discovery and audit
• Scale: Event Portal API management, alongside Insights and Schema Registry

Discovery and audit are in Accelerate, not Foundation. A team that buys Foundation gets a design and catalogue tool but not the runtime comparison shown in the diagram. The 30-day trial includes Event Portal with up to 15,000 objects and one small broker service (product page).

Limits and open questions

• Cloud only, as far as we found. Event Portal is part of Solace Cloud. An air-gapped site can run the agent in standalone mode and move JSON files by hand, but cannot use the connected loop.
• AsyncAPI version. Solace documents exporting AsyncAPI documents in JSON or YAML, but the pages we reviewed do not state which specification version is produced. AsyncAPI 3.0 was released in December 2023. Ask before you build tooling on the output.
• Importing AsyncAPI. Native import of existing AsyncAPI files is not described in the docs we read. The AsyncAPI and catalogue page covers the workarounds.
• Event API Products are Beta in Solace’s documentation as of October 2026.
• Discovery coverage. The agent supports Solace and Kafka-family brokers. It does not list MQTT-only plant brokers, so a UNS on another MQTT broker is outside automated discovery.
• No public pricing, and key governance features sit in the middle package.
• AI features are new. The AI Design Assistant (April 2026) and MCP server are recent; decide what model data they may see.

How to evaluate Solace Event Portal

• Are we design-first or discover-first? If discover-first, which brokers must the agent scan, and are they on its supported list?
• Which package includes the discovery and audit features we need?
• Which AsyncAPI version does export produce, and does our tooling accept it?
• What metadata leaves our network when the agent runs in connected mode?
• Who will own each application domain, and who approves a new schema version?
• How will automatic broker configuration interact with our existing Terraform or change control?
• Can we export the full catalogue if we stop using the product?
• Do we need a runtime schema registry as well, and is it in the quote?

Deeper

• Solace AsyncAPI and the event catalogue: how Event Portal produces AsyncAPI documents, what a good catalogue entry holds, and the import question
• Solace Event Management Agent: runtime discovery and audit of Solace and Kafka brokers, connected and standalone

Back to the Solace hub, or across to Solace Cloud, the managed service whose account Event Portal lives in.