Building a Custom Connector Using the Sample Connector › How to Build a Custom Connector › Connector Considerations

Connector Considerations

There are some basic questions to consider before developing a connector. Depending on the domain manager and the complexity of the data, you can take different approaches, such as the following:

• Get every property for every entity and then determine how to normalize them
• Identify the data needed to fill all the USM property values and determine what domain manager data you need for those properties

Usually, the process falls somewhere in between and becomes an iterative approach as you start seeing what the domain manager data looks like and try to determine how to map it to USM types.

Some common questions to address when planning a custom connector are as follows:

• What entities and associated properties can the domain manager provide and how do I get them?
• Which of these entities can be represented in USM?
• Does the domain manager provide a group or service concept?
• How is an alert represented?
• How can you access the domain manager CI and alert data?
• Does the domain manager provide launch in context capabilities?
• Will CIs be updated or deleted?
• What USM types best describe the types of resources these entities represent?
• What USM properties require data and what is their format?
• What properties of the domain manager entities can fill the required properties of USM?
• What normalization is necessary to convert the domain manager property values to the USM format?

For more information about the USM types to which you can normalize all domain manager resources, see the USM schema documentation. For information about how to access the USM documentation, see How to Access the USM Schema Documentation.