User Guide › Design › Data Acquisition › Adapters › Adding Adapters

Adding Adapters

You define a new adapter in CA Business Service Insight using the CA Business Service Insight user interface and in the target machine where the adapter is deployed and runs. This section covers the steps required to create the adapter in the CA Business Service Insight user interface. For the complete adapter definition workflow refer to Deploying Adapters.

When adding an adapter, it is mainly to define the way to communicate with the adapter deployed in the target machine. In addition, the configuration of the adapter is defined, which specifies:

• Adapter definition in CA Business Service Insight
• Adapter definition in the target machine
• Adapter configuration file definition

You use the Adapter Wizard to quickly and easily create the adapter configuration.

You can also create the adapter configuration in a manual manner without using the wizard. Adapters that are not created using the wizard are defined as unmanaged-configuration adapters. The reasons for having unmanaged adapters are:

• To support adapters that were created before the wizard was available in the product. Those adapters already have configurations in place. It is possible to create new adapters by using predefined configuration files and thereby create new managed adapters based on the configuration of the unmanaged adapters which will become obsolete.
• There are some features that are supported by the adapter configuration and not by the wizard. If the modeling of the adapter requires the use of those features, the configuration should be created manually. The features that are not supported by the wizard are listed in Adapter Wizard Unsupported Features.

There are four options to add an adapter:

• Add a text file adapter

  Guides the user through the adapter wizard steps required for creating an adapter that gathers information from text files.

• Add a SQL adapter

  Guides the user through the adapter wizard steps required for creating an adapter that gathers information from data sources that can be accessed by SQL using ODBC.

• Add unmanaged configuration adapters

  For creating adapters with the adapter configuration. This option requires entering basic details on how to communicate with the deployed adapter.

• Adapters created from a configuration file

  For creating adapters based on an existing configuration file. After selecting the configuration file, the adapter wizard is opened with the configuration details already filled in the relevant wizard fields.