Managing device adapters

BMC Network Automation ships with built-in device adapters for a large number of vendors and models. If you want to support other devices or other operations on devices in your enterprise, you can create additional adapters.

The goal of the device adapter management module is to manage the following supported entities:

  • Vendors: A vendor defines an equipment manufacturer, used for organizing device types.
  • Device Types: A device type defines how to interact with one flavor or model of equipment, including how to obtain and modify its configuration or settings.
  • Configuration Trails: A configuration trail defines one collection or group of configuration settings that can be obtained from a device, where the system will maintain a change history over time.
  • Custom Actions: A custom action defines commands to be run on a device that perform a non-standard operation (that is, an operation beyond the standard span actions shipped with the system, such as snapshot, deploy to active, reboot, etc).
  • External Script Actions: An external script action defines a program or script that can be executed by a job that performs some sort of highly site-specific customized manipulations.

These entities are referred to as adapters. You can manage them from the BMC Network Automation user interface without restarting the BMC Network Automation application server. This capability ensures higher server availability. For information about creating custom device adapters, see Developing-a-custom-action-adapter.

The following table contains tasks and information for managing your device adapters by using BMC Network Automation, and provides links to the applicable topics:

Administering task

For more information

Benefit

To import new adapter files

Add a new device adapter

To modify and export adapter files

Analyze, modify, and import the exported file to another BMC Network Automation system

To perform actions on device adapters

Use the adapter list to perform the following device adapter operations:

  • Importing
  • Re-importing
  • Exporting
  • Enabling
  • Disabling
  • Deleting

To understand adapter concepts

Review the topics to understand the following:

  • Details of disabling various types of adapters
  • Rules that govern the state of adapters
  • Access-grant that BMC Network Automation provides to the user who imported the action


 

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