About this Guide

Data Aggregator provides a vendor self-certification interface that lets you expand CA Performance Management monitoring support. Self-certification lets you supplement the existing metric families in Data Aggregator with new or custom components and metrics from vendor MIBs.

You can create a vendor certification or modify existing device or component support. This guide discusses how to add new technology support with custom metric families, along with the custom vendor support.

This guide addresses advanced scenarios for creating custom vendor certifications and metric families. A basic knowledge of XML and schema files is required.

Note: Data Aggregator provides basic and advanced methods for creating custom vendor certifications and metric families. The basic method is a simpler process, consisting of adding vendor support for existing supported technologies (metric families), using the user interface. This method meets the requirements of many users. However, the advanced method is based on the factory certification format and exposes a complete set of capabilities. This guide explains the advanced certification method. For information about the basic certification method, see the Data Aggregator Basic Self-Certification Guide.

This guide follows a specific example throughout. As an administrator, you want to monitor Frame Relay permanent virtual circuits (PVCs). Out-of-the-box, Data Aggregator does not have support to monitor Frame Relays PVCs, but you can use self-certification to generate this support. In this guide, we provide the steps to define the component, create a custom metric family, and define a custom vendor certification to monitor Frame Relay permanent virtual circuits (PVCs).