Overview of plugins and adapters for federated data
The following topics are discussed in this section:
Federation Manager plugins and adapters provide the mechanism to connect the master BMC Atrium Configuration Management Database (BMC Atrium CMDB) to external sources of data, federating data from different types of repositories. The following figure illustrates the concept of federation between BMC Atrium CMDB and a federated Oracle database.
Federation between BMC Atrium CMDB and federated database
The following table explains these federation concepts.
Important federation concepts explained
Federation concept | Description |
---|---|
Core BMC Atrium CMDB classes | Store Configuration Item (CI) instances (for example, |
Federated data classes | Represent data that is stored externally (for example, data in an Oracle database). In the retrieval method of federation, you can use BMC Atrium Explorer to view or query this data in the context of the data model. |
Federated relationships | Join the core BMC Atrium CMDB classes with the federated data classes. |
Adapter | Provides the code-level connectivity between BMC Atrium CMDB and an external source of data. It enables you to federate data from various external data sources (for example, the Oracle adapter connects to a JDBC-compliant Oracle database). |
Plugin | Provides access to an external source of data. The plugin uses an adapter and other information, such as the user name and password required to access a database. |
Database | Contains the data (for example, incidents or change requests) in database tables that you do not want to store directly in the BMC Atrium CMDB. |
As shown by the downward arrows in the illustration, BMC Atrium CMDB can establish links from its own data to the external data source, but the external source cannot establish links to BMC Atrium CMDB. Federated data is not bidirectional.
You can use any adapter in one or more plugins. For example, you might use a single JDBC adapter to configure two different plugins, with each plugin configured to connect with a different external database. BMC Atrium CMDB includes three adapters at installation:
- JDBC — Enables you to federate data from any JDBC-compliant database. For more information, see Creating a JDBC plugin.
- CMDBf — Enables you to federate data from any CMDBf-compliant CMDB. If you have third-party CMDBs in your environment, you can use the CMDBf adapter. For more information, see Creating a CMDBf plugin.
- AR — Enables you to federate data from forms on any BMC Remedy AR System servers. For more information, see Creating an AR plugin.
If you want to connect to an external data source of a different type, you must first create a new adapter. For more information, see Registering a federated data adapter with BMC Remedy AR System.
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