Integration Overview

ASM Core provides a common Integration Platform to set up various types of integration with external applications and technologies with a view to automate the transfer of information.

ASM can facilitate the transfer of information (for the resolution of calls or the completion of tasks, for example), the management of alerts across different systems, and the population of the ASM Core CMDB with externally discovered resources.

The Integrated Platform

The ASM Integration platform is designed to enable easy integration with external applications, data sources and products in ASM. The platform provides a powerful user interface granting end-users maximum configurability of all their integrations from a single, unified administration area accessible from via the application client. The platform defines a minimal set of connector interfaces that provide the basic services that are required by each integration, which makes developing plug-in connectors much quicker.

The Integration platform supports four integration scenarios. Each scenario is associated with a particular type of data.

• The Federated CMDB, which allows you to communicate with external applications (network discovery tools or LDAP-compliant directory servers) to discover resources on these applications. Once detected, those resources can be imported into ASM as CMDB records or linked to existing CMDB records.

• Event Management, which enables ASM to handle incoming alerts received from network monitoring tools and track the progress of these alerts through calls or requests.

• Outbound Actions, which invoke business process, automated tasks or logging tickets with Service Desk as Outbound Actions.

• Inbound Actions, which enables ASM to initiate items such as calls and tasks in other applications.

Role of Connectors

Communication with supported external applications is performed through a series of connectors (one per external application) supplied with ASM Core and which must be installed on the ASM Core server.

Once a connector is installed, the system administrator must:

• Configure sources, which are instances of the connector or external system in ASM Core

• Enable and further configure each module of the Integration Platform

• Set up the appropriate security rights for analysts to manage external resources, events and Inbound and Outbound Actions.