Automate downloading and import of DLAs

Many clients augment the information in the TADDM database by importing Discovery Library Adapter (DLA) books. DLA books represent the ‘latest-and-greatest’ discovery information gathered by specialized programs - Discovery Library Adapters (DLA) - that execute independently of the TADDM environment to gather discovery information and store it in an xml format (the book). IBM provides DLAs that can capture information form specialized systems such as Z/OS environments, IBM Tivoli Network Manager (ITNM), IBM Tivoli monitoring, and others, so that the configuration and relationship information that these environments are aware of, can be captured and stored in a format that TADDM can understand.

One of the challenges for clients that use DLAs is that the DLA books must be made available to the TADDM environment in an automated fashion. Many clients wrap the execution of DLAs in scripts that automatically copy the locally stored DLA books to a shared file system, from which they can be accessed from the TADDM side. However, this option is not available to the Z/OS DLA, which executes in the mainframe environment, and therefore does not have access to a filesystem that can be shared with the distributed environment. To enable storage of the DLA books in a shared file system, the Z/OS DLA provide functions to automatically upload the DLA books to an ftp server. However, there are no facilities in TADDM to automatically download and import DLA books from an ftp server – until now.

The loadDlaBooks utility enables you to automatically

download DLA books (or other files) from an ftp server
store them in a file system that is accessible from the TADDM server
generate delta DLA books
load the information into the TADDM database
remove the processed files both on the ftp server and locally

with a single command.

Naturally, the execution of this command can be scheduled – for example by cron – so that the process of importing DLA books becomes fully automated.

To get your copy of the loadDlaBooks utility, you download the files attached to this entry, and follow the instructions in the loadDlaBooks User's Guide.

The files you need are: