Support by Means of the Generic Collector Facility

By means of its generic collector facility, IT Service Vision supports data sources other than those for which it supplies staging code and table definitions. An example of such a data source might be a log file generated by a user-written application. For each of these generic collectors, IT Service Vision provides:

• access to SAS for creating the SAS code that stages the data (as staging data sets or DATA step views)
  
• support for creating one or more user-generated table definitions and support for creating the table(s) in your PDB
  
  
• a macro that invokes IT Service Vision
  
  
• a macro that processes the staged data into the tables in your PDB
  
  
• a macro that reduces the data in the PDB
  
  
• macros that report on the data in the PDB
  
  
• utility macros to manage the PDB.
  
  Note: The macros mentioned in this list work both with generic collectors and supplied collectors. They are not specific to a collector. Some of these macros are used by more than one collector.

The writing of this kind of user-specific SAS code and generating user-specific table and variable definitions is called writing (the table definition and staging code for) a generic collector. You can write a generic collector for almost any time-based data source.

This document provides instructions for writing a generic collector. For an example, it uses the writing of a generic collector for data from a log file maintained by a fax system. This fax data, log, and system is imaginary but serves the purpose of an example.

Note: This icon will represent the writing of a generic collector for a sample fax log. The next time you see your collector's icon, click the icon for more information. Also, in the IT Service Vision Showroom, there may be additional documentation on this collector and/or other generic collectors.

Label	Icon	Collector
FAX		Fax Collector

The IT Service Vision Showroom also contains information on how to web-enable reports on data from any collector.