Synchronizing attributes in BMC Atrium CMDB to Infrastructure Management

You can synchronize certain classes and attributes that are present in BMC Atrium CMDB  to Infrastructure Management service impact management cell. For example, assume that you want Operating System to be displayed in the Services Editor screen in the administration console. However, BMC_OperatingSystem is not a class present in service impact management but is present in BMC Atrium CMDB.

You can select the attributes that must be synchoronized in two ways:

• You can select attributes of service impact management classes by setting custom properties attribute to one of the following custom qualifier values:

  • 100050: Indicate Infrastructure Management-enabled classes. Set the value in custom properties as 1\100050\2\1.

  • 300050: Indicate Infrastructure Management-enabled attributes. Set the value in custom properties as 2\300050\2\1\300070\2\1.

    
    

• You can select attributes of classes that are related to service impact management classes, to synchronize with the service impact management class, by providing the path. Such attributes are referred to as path attributes. Infrastructure Management does not select path attributes out-of-the-box. Therefore, after enabling and configuring the required path attributes, you must export the class information manually.

How does the synchronization work?

The synchronization works if you set the PathClassInfo=mc_sm_object_path.baroc property in the pserver.conf file. You must manually copy the PathClassInfo=mc_sm_object_path.baroc property from the server/etc/default/pserver.conf file to the server/etc/pserver.conf file.

When you set this property, the Publishing Server looks up the slots in the mc_sm_object_path.baroc file. The mc_sm_object_path.baroc file may contain many classes. The first line for each class in the mc_sm_object_path.baroc file must correspond to the line of that class in the mc_sm_object.baroc file. Each class can have one or more than one path slots. The BAROC definitions define if the additional slot is simple (such as STRING) or a list (such as LIST_OF STRING).

For example, if you want the name of the OS, type, product suite, and application names to be available for the BMC_ComputerSystem configuration item (CI)  in Infrastructure Management, the following will be the content of the mc_sm_object_path.baroc file:

ROOT : MC_SM_COMPONENT; END
ENUMERATION OSType END # no need to define the enum values. they will be retrieved from Atrium CMDB.
MC_SM_COMPONENT: BMC_ComputerSystem
DEFINES {
OSName : STRING, path='BMC_HostedSystemComponents:BMC_OperatingSystem:Name';
OSType : OSType, path='BMC_HostedSystemComponents:BMC_OperatingSystem:OSType';
OSProductSuite: STRING, path='BMC_HostedSystemComponents:BMC_OperatingSystem:OSProductSuite'; # STRING type will be reverted to OSProductSuite enum type
AppNames: LIST_OF STRING, path = 'BMC_Dependency(Name = APPLICATIONSYSTEMCOMPONENT):BMC_Application:Name';
};
END

In this example, the first item in the path value indicates the relationship class (BMC_HostedSystemComponents) with the source CI class (BMC_ComputerSystem), followed by the destination class (BMC_OperatingSystem).

The Publishing Server verifies the existence of the specified classes and traces an error in case the provided classes or attributes do not exist in BMC Atrium CMDB. If the relationship class has the one-to-many relationship, and the path slot is defined as a simple slot, then a warning is traced.

You can specify an EnumType slot as a string (OSProductSuite in the example above). This string is automatically reverted into the enum type OSProductSuite that corresponds to the attribute in BMC Atrium CMDB.

If you specify an EnumType slot as an enum type (OSType in the example above), then the mc_sm_object_path.baroc file must contain the definition of the EnumType slot. However, the definition is not required to define the enum vlaues. They are automatically retrieved corresponding to the selection of the attribute in BMC Atrium CMDB.

The Publishing Server must execute an additional path query on BMC Atrium CMDB for each path. This impacts the performance of a publication. For this reason, BMC recommends that path slots be limited to the minimum possible number.

After specifying slots, run the pclassinfo –x command to export the mc_sm_object.baroc file with the service impact management attribute and the path attribute. The exported mc_sm_object.baroc file contains no difference between the two kinds of attributes.

Restart the BMC TrueSight Infrastructure Management Server after running the pclassinfo –x command.

Limitation

The attributes synchronization does not work for classes that are more than one relationship away from a SIM-enabled class in BMC Atrium CMDB.