Adapters

Adapters enable BMC Atrium Orchestrator workflows to perform specialized functions within external applications. Adapters are located on peers and are configured to establish connections and facilitate communications between the BMC Atrium Orchestrator workflow and the external applications and support systems. This topic includes the following sections:

For a list of available adapters, modules, and run books see Adapters, modules, and run books

Adapter types

BMC Atrium Orchestrator provides two types of adapters: actor adapters and monitor adapters.

• Actor adapters are used by BMC Atrium Orchestrator workflows to submit requests to and elicit responses from external systems. The communication is usually through an API exposed by the external system. All actor adapter actions originate inside workflow processes and are targeted at the external system whose API is implemented by the adapter.

• Monitor adapters listen to external systems and, based on their configuration and rules, generate events. These events are evaluated by rules and can trigger specific workflow processes when the rule criteria are met. All monitor adapter events originate from the external system being monitored.

Adapter classes

BMC Atrium Orchestrator adapters are classified as base adapters or application adapters.

Base adapters

Base adapters interact with external systems using standard protocols, such as JDBC, Telnet, SSH, and JMS, and through the native operating-system command line. BMC Atrium Orchestrator provides terminal adapters, which are base adapters that communicate directly with the server operating system. Terminal adapters integrate with servers and network devices that expose a terminal interface. Using a terminal adapter, you can submit any supported command to the operating system interface to be executed in the same way you would submit the command from the console keyboard.

Application adapters

Application adapters implement the API of an external application to provide an interface. The adapter developer uses the methods exposed by the external API to create adapter actions that the workflow developer uses to extract data from and manipulate the operation of the external application. The adapter can be developed using technologies like Java, C++ (or other language-based APIs), web services, or JDBC.

Adapters are used by workflows to build the processes that compose a solution. Workflows built to solve a specific problem can be grouped into modules.

Integration using adapters

Adapters are the integration mechanisms most widely used in BMC Atrium Orchestrator integrations. The BMC Atrium Orchestrator platform supports more than 19 base adapters and 30 application adapters.

When deciding whether to use an adapter, ensure that you evaluate the adapter's requirements.

Adapter requirements

When using BMC Atrium Orchestrator adapters to perform integrations, the configuration and tuning of an adapter is important. In data-oriented integrations, for example, you must be able to process a high volume of data in an ordered and predictable manner, which means that the adapter must be configured for high data throughput. BMC Atrium Orchestrator adapters achieve these requirements when you configure multiple threads of execution, concurrent connections to the external system, and simultaneous command execution. In this example, you would also need to tune the adapter so that it allows connection pooling and resource sharing to limit the resource requirements if you have high transaction volume.

Related topics

Operations Actions Management modules
Web services