Build your Own Connector

The Connector Builder Page allows you to develop custom connectors so you can integrate other external applications seamlessly with ASM to pass and retrieve data.

Communication with the supported external applications is performed through connectors that you can now build in the Connector designer page in ASM, rather than wait for others to build and install them on your server.The Connector Builder page only supports building custom CMDB connectors for the time being.

Available in HERMES (ASM Version 10.6) and higher.

To begin building your own connector, please reach out to your Technical Account Manager, or Alemba Support.

What problems does building a connector via the Connector Designer solve?

You can create a custom connector from scratch, build it exactly how you want it and get the information exactly how you need it!

You can now build a custom connector in ASM that will allow you to communicate with external applications to discover resources on those applications. Once detected, those resources can be imported into ASM as Federated CMDB records or lined to the existing CMDB records.

To create a custom connector, you must describe the API you want to connect to so that the connector you’re building understands the API’s operations and data structures.

In the Connector Builder page, you can determine the types of resources to be imported from the supported categories: Bulletin, CMDB Item, Contract, Cost Center, Knowledge, Location, Organization, Person and Subscriber Group.

What types of data are supported?

Depending on the 3rd party system and the type of data it provides, you can choose and specify which type of value a variable has.

What happens after you build the connector in the configuration process?

Once your connector has been built and tested, you can put your custom connector to work. You will need to configure the connector for ASM to successfully connect to the 3rd party source with the specified parameters.

Define a source to configure instances of external sources with which ASM can connect in order to import or update objects and exchange information. For integration with the Federated CMDB, a source is the system to which ASM can connect to import objects discovered by a network discovery tool into ASM or import users from a directory server.
Configure the resources that you defined in the Connector Builder. This enables you to view the resource type configured on a selected source and create mappings for each of these resource types. This will allow you to create mappings between the external resource and ASM CMDB item fields.
You can view and create schedules for running scans on sources for the purpose of importing external resources.
You can view the resource link types configured on a selected source and create mappings for each of these link types.
You can set up appropriate security rights for Analysts to manage external resources.

Known Issue: Incorrect Data is populated in ASM from Azure AD when using the Connector Builder

Root Cause: Enabling "Display Cached Resource Properties in Search Results" in the integration settings can cause issues where the cached values are not cleared when a value on the next record is empty or null.

Fix:

Disable "Display Cached Resource Properties in Search Results" in the integration settings.
Set the field set type for the User resource type to be "Mapped" instead of "Relative". This will ensure the cache values are not retained during the scan.

Last updated 7 days ago

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What problems does building a connector via the Connector Designer solve?

You can create a custom connector from scratch, build it exactly how you want it and get the information exactly how you need it!

To create a custom connector, you must describe the API you want to connect to so that the connector you’re building understands the API’s operations and data structures.

What happens after you build the connector in the configuration process?

Define a source to configure instances of external sources with which ASM can connect in order to import or update objects and exchange information. For integration with the Federated CMDB, a source is the system to which ASM can connect to import objects discovered by a network discovery tool into ASM or import users from a directory server.

Configure the resources that you defined in the Connector Builder. This enables you to view the resource type configured on a selected source and create mappings for each of these resource types. This will allow you to create mappings between the external resource and ASM CMDB item fields.

You can view and create schedules for running scans on sources for the purpose of importing external resources.

You can view the resource link types configured on a selected source and create mappings for each of these link types.

You can set up appropriate security rights for Analysts to manage external resources.

Known Issue: Incorrect Data is populated in ASM from Azure AD when using the Connector Builder

Fix:

Disable "Display Cached Resource Properties in Search Results" in the integration settings.
Set the field set type for the User resource type to be "Mapped" instead of "Relative". This will ensure the cache values are not retained during the scan.