Overview: Development Process for Business Adapter

Business adapters import non-inventory data (such as purchases or enterprise structure) that helps to determine your compliance position. There are two separate modes in which business adapters can operate:
  • In connected mode, where they run on your central application server, and therefore have direct access to your central operations databases.
  • In disconnected mode, where they cannot connect to the operations databases because they run on an inventory beacon that is remote from it. Here you have some restricted capabilities to increase security.
Important: In connected mode, data is injected directly into your operations database. You cannot see any evidence of the import in the Business Data tab of the Data Imports page (Data Collection > IT Assets Inventory Tasks > Data Imports) on your compliance console (this tab shows results only for imports from your inventory beacons).

You build, review, and run your business adapter on an inventory beacon.

To develop a business adapter (overview):

  1. Launch Business Adapter Studio and add a framework for a new adapter (see To Start the Business Adapter Studio).
  2. Configure the connection to the data source. This is where data will be imported from. See Connecting to a Data Source.
  3. Confirm that you are querying the correct data from the data source. See Reviewing Data from the Source.
  4. Load the list of properties from the data source, so that they can be mapped to objects in IT Asset Management. See Retrieving the List of Fields.
  5. Link the objects in your source data to the objects that you want to update in IT Asset Management. See Choosing Target Database Items in IT Asset Management.
  6. Define rules that manage updates and creation of these objects, based on the incoming data. See Defining Import Rules for a Database Item.
  7. Define a mapping between the properties in the data source to those of the objects in IT Asset Management. See Defining Import Rules for Attributes/Properties.
  8. Save the adapter (Saving Business Adapters).

IT Asset Management (Cloud)

Current