About the Adapter Setup Wizard

What Is the Adapter Setup Wizard?

The Adapter Setup wizard enables you to define and create staging, aggregation, information map, and reporting jobs that process the raw data for an IT resource. These jobs include predefined configurations that are based on industry intelligence that represents a best estimate about the types of aggregations and reports that most sites need for analysis.
Note: The Adapter Setup wizard produces staging, Aggregation, Information Map, Exception, and Performance Report transformations that are good choices for many users. However, you might have site-specific requirements. Therefore, you should examine the results of the Adapter Setup wizard. You might need to add or delete elements of the jobs, transformations, or tables in order to accommodate the needs of your site or organization.
After the wizard creates the appropriate jobs, you can schedule and run each job as needed. The jobs process the raw data in a manner that is specified by or based on a selected adapter and domain category.
For more information about using the Adapter Setup wizard, see Accessing and Navigating the Adapter Setup Wizard.

Advantages of the Adapter Setup Wizard

The Adapter Setup wizard defines and programmatically creates jobs and the metadata for staged tables, aggregations, information maps, exception, and performance reporting jobs for a given adapter. In addition, the wizard also applies intelligence to these objects. Here are some of the benefits that the Adapter Setup wizard provides:
  • programmatic creation of staging, aggregation, and information map jobs that include transformations and output tables that are used for staging and aggregating data with the recommended summarizations, statistics, percentiles, percent changes, moving averages, and rankings for performance reporting
  • programmatic creation of jobs that include Performance Report transformations that use predetermined information maps and report definitions to build relevant reports based on a given adapter and domain category
  • programmatic creation of exception jobs for those staged tables of an adapter and domain category for which exception definitions are supplied
  • options to specify the scope and size of jobs that are created for a given adapter as determined by output level (staging job only, minimal, typical, and full) or other criteria (domain category, time period, key metrics, and so on)
  • translation of metrics in the raw data source to standard units of measure
  • generation of a default set of computed columns that are appropriate for the adapter data source
  • the ability to choose appropriate statistics for aggregations and weighting them appropriately
  • a default list of metrics that will be ranked
  • an appropriate set of aggregations based on the staged data for the adapter data source
  • a default set of filters that might be useful for limiting the output size of aggregations
  • categorization of data in summarized aggregations by appropriate specification of class variables
  • creation of an information map for each aggregation table
  • report-ready data
With the Adapter Setup wizard, you can create comprehensive jobs that meet your reporting needs.

Naming Conventions That the Adapter Setup Wizard Uses

The Adapter Setup wizard uses specific naming conventions when naming and saving the various folders, jobs, transformations, and tables that it creates. These standards simplify the management and maintenance of the various objects that are interrelated. For best results, if you edit the IT data mart folders, subfolders, jobs, transformations, or tables that the Adapter Setup wizard creates, then use the same naming conventions that the Adapter Setup wizard uses for consistency and efficiency.
This chapter provides several examples of the naming conventions that the Adapter Setup wizard uses. For a comprehensive list of the naming conventions and location standards that SAS IT Resource Management uses, see About Naming Standards for SAS IT Resource Management Objects.