Implementation Guide › Implementation › Data Gathering (Data Source Expert) › Adapter Environment

Adapter Environment

The following entities relate to the Adapter and its configuration and execution parameters.

Data source:

Data source to which the Adapter connects and from which it retrieves data in its original format.

Work files:

Output files produced by the Adapter and which are written within the processes (for more details refer to Work Files).

CA Business Service Insight Adapter listener:

Three message types are transferred between the Adapter and the Adapter Listener:

• Control: Start\stop\pause messages sent by the listener to the Adapter and back again when the Adapter changes its status.
• Translations: Adapter sends requests for the translation table content and requests for specific translation values. The listener returns the tables and the translated value. The Adapter listener receives the indication from the Task Host that a translation entry was translated. It then sends the message to the Adapter.
• Raw data: Unified raw data events sent by the Adapter. These events are sent in packets and include acknowledgments.

CA Business Service Insight Log server

Adapter can be configured to send log messages to the system log as well as writing them to a local file. If the port and IP address of the log server are specified and set in the registry settings of the Adapter, then the Adapter sends messages to the log server as well.

The following diagram describes the Adapter process in relation to each of the entities with which it interacts.

The following is a description of the Adapter process interaction with these entities:

Configuration file:

Contains settings for some or all of the Adapter's configuration parameters. The Adapter uses the configuration file to determine the connection method that is used by the Adapter and the Metrics for parsing in order to create the Event output. This is an XML file, and the format contains six basic elements:

General:

Miscellaneous Adapter attributes (working directory, output files, debugging flag).

OblicoreInterface:

Attributes for connection with the CA Business Service Insight Server.

DataSourceInterface:

Attributes for connection with the data source (files path and pattern, connection strings, SQL queries, and so on)

InputFormatCollection:

Parsing Metrics for analyzing and manipulating source data.

TranslatorCollection:

Metrics for building the unified event compounded of the parsed and manipulated data fields.

TranslationTableCollection:

Metrics for mapping data between original data and CA Business Service Insight entities.

Each of these six sections contains all of the relevant information that allows the Adapter to connect to the data source, retrieve the required information, parse it into CA Business Service Insight unified events structures, and store it within the CA Business Service Insight Raw Data table.