Connectors

A connector is software that provides the interface for the data exchange between the CA Catalyst infrastructure and a domain manager. Connectors are the gateway through which data is retrieved from various domain managers for a consolidated management. Each integrated product has its own connector that supports one or both of the following operation types:

Outbound from connector

Outbound from connector operations obtain data (such as services, CIs, topology, alerts, and status) from the source domain manager. All connectors must implement outbound operations. Outbound data populates the CA Catalyst Persistence Store.

Outbound data flows to one or more clients. Clients such as CA Catalyst consume the data to implement a unified view of data from multiple domain managers and their connectors.

Inbound to connector

Inbound to connector operations (also referred to as "southbound") use records in the CA Catalyst Persistent Store and the CA Catalyst Synchronizer to create, update, or delete items in the source domain manager. The inbound operations enable domain manager synchronization with the changes that CI reconciliation, CI creation, and CI updates initiate in other domain managers.

Many provided connectors support inbound operations. Connectors that implement inbound operations sometimes limit the implementation to a subset of the types and properties their outbound operations support.

A bidirectional connector supports both inbound and outbound operations. Outbound-only connectors contain one connector policy file that transforms the gathered data to the standard USM format. Bidirectional connectors contain two connector policy files that transform outbound data to the USM format and transform inbound data to the source format of the domain manager.

You can configure connectors and start and stop them by accessing the CA SOI Administration UI.

CA SOI also provides the following tools for defining custom integrations:

The Universal connector that can retrieve services, CIs, and status events from various CA Technologies and third-party products. The Universal connector provides a web services interface that products can use to publish new services, CIs, and events, which are normalized to a common format and made available to the SA Manager.
A connector SDK for developing custom connectors. The SDK includes a Sample connector, which provides the framework for writing a connector to integrate with important applications in your enterprise.
An Event connector that collects events from low-level event sources, transforms them into the CA SOI alert format, and displays them as infrastructure alerts in CA SOI associated with existing or created CIs.

Note: For more information about the connectors provided, see the Release Notes. For more information about connector architecture and how to build custom integrations, see the Connector Guide. Each connector also ships with a connector-specific Connector Guide that contains information about connector installation, configuration, how the connector interprets data from its domain manager, and whether it supports inbound operations.