The Architecture of Compliance Importer

IT Asset Management (Cloud)

Compliance Importer is the framework within which inventory adapters function, and therefore dictates the requirements for each adapter.

The Compliance Importer is the software that executes inventory adapters to import data into IT Asset Management. It is a generic data import framework, but specific procedures are provided to import inventory data from source databases.

Once data is imported, it is matched to existing information in IT Asset Management, the Application Recognition Library is applied, and license compliance is calculated.

The overall model of the Compliance Importer is as follows:

• A set of procedures is defined for the import process. Procedures are grouped by their purposes as Readers, Writers and Export procedures.
• Tables are provided for intermediate storage and workspace for data used by each procedure.
• The main purpose of readers is to read data from a source database, and use it to populate the staging tables in the operations database. When operating in disconnected mode on an inventory beacon (as is always the case with IT Asset Management as a cloud service), the readers work in two stages: writing the gathered data to an intermediate package on the inventory beacon for later upload to the central application server; and subsequently loading the intermediate package data into the staging tables.
• Readers may also perform operations on data in the source database, usually to prepare data before returning results.
• Writers update the operations database, using the data in the staging tables to determine the changes to make.

Understanding the function of the Reader procedures is especially important to preparing inventory adapters.