Adapters are modules in charge of collecting data from data sources and passing it to the CA Business Service Insight system. Adapters filter data coming from the data source and manipulate it in such a way, so that when it reaches the system it contains only the information needed for service level calculations in the correct structure.
The Adapter platform provides the flexibility to:
Basically, every Adapter consists of two components:
There are two types of the generic Adapter component, an ASCII file Adapter component and an ODBC based SQL Adapter component. These components allow connecting to a data source and parsing it as an ASCII file or executing an SQL query on it.
Every Adapter requires a configuration file to know where and how to connect, what to retrieve, and how to transform and translate the data into generic CA Transactions and Events. CA Business Service Insight provides every generic Adapter type with a default XML configuration template file which can be fine-tuned to represent customer specifics regarding the data source with which it has to connect. The XML configuration file defines which fields should be retrieved, how they should be identified, how they should be converted to the system normalized database, and so on.
Note: An Adapter Wizard is built into the user interface allowing basic customization of this XML template online. This serves the same purpose as creating the XML configuration file for the Adapter. More details on this feature can be found later in this chapter.
The Adapter platform includes a restart/recovery mechanism and can handle problems in data received from third party tools, such as tool crash, network problems, missing data, duplicate data, garbage data, gaps in the data, data validation, and so on. Every Adapter provides for full data integrity and complete tracking and logging of all Adapter messages and is covered later in this guide in more detail.
CA Business Service Insight Adapters can run as a service or as an application (visible or not visible). CA Business Service Insight Adapter technology supports advanced security mechanisms, such as, encryption, hand shake and authentication processes.
It is important to note at this stage, that the Adapter Wizard is a mechanism of automating the following processes and tasks. While certain elements mentioned may not always be visible when using the Wizard-driven approach, they are all still present “behind the scenes” of the wizard interface.
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