Use > Data Flow Management > Data Acquisition Best Practices with Data Flow Management > Federation or Population and Discovery > Determine a Data Acquisition Strategy

Determine a Data Acquisition Strategy

Whenever an organization needs configuration data for a new IT Domain, the CMS administrator needs to determine the strategy for data acquisition:

  • Data for the new IT Domain can be acquired from an MDR via federation or population.
  • Data for the new IT Domain can be collected via Discovery (via direct access to managed entities).

For example, an organization decides to initiate a configuration management process for all Oracle instances. The CMS administrator needs to decide how the configuration information for Oracle instances will be acquired. The following are the available options:

  • Federate or populate data from the MDR of the Oracle Management Application which maintains information regarding all Oracle instances in the organization.
  • Acquire the configuration data via Discovery, via direct access to each Oracle instance (by running one of the Oracle discovery jobs in DFM).
Note: The UCMDB Configuration Management Application cannot manage compliancy for federated data. If compliancy is required for all data, then federation is not an option. The UCMDB Configuration Management Application can only manage compliancy for CIs which are physically stored in the UCMDB.

Acquiring Data via an MDR Using Federation

The following are examples of cases where collecting data via access to an MDR is preferable:

  • There is a relevant MDR whose level of detail and data accuracy meet the requirements of the configuration management process.
  • The owners of managed entities refuse to provide the credentials of the managed entities.
  • Direct access to the managed entities is limited to times when the managed entities are not in use by the production environment. Access to the MDR is not limited to these times and is more flexible.

Acquiring Data via Discovery (Direct Access to Managed Entities)

The following are examples of cases where collecting data via direct access to managed entities is preferable:

  • There is no relevant MDR.
  • It is not possible to trust the data accuracy of the MDR or the detail level of the data in the MDR does not meet the requirements for the implementation of the ITIL process.

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