Introduction to user defined data receivers

Introduction

Workflow and functionality

User permissions

Licensing

Introduction 

The user defined data receiver functionality lets you add monitoring of, or extend Entuity’s default data model with, new objects, metrics, or other information for devices and software-defined platforms that use newer technologies, such as streaming telemetry.  

Data received from the user defined data receivers is integrated with the Entuity data model, making the data visible and accessible throughout the UI in the same manner as other attributes. For example, you can view Object Attributes, Object Associations, and Key Information in UI dashlets, reports, charts, and so on. 

Entuity can receive streaming telemetry data through port 57000, and can queue streaming telemetry messages through the Message Broker, which listens on port 61620 (by default). You can also configure Entuity to queue streaming telemetry messages on a different port, as long as no conflicts exist with the port.

To configure the port that Entuity uses to queue streaming telemetry messages: 

• Edit the Message Broker Configuration section of the configure process. For more information, see How do I configure Entuity from the command line?.
  
  Or:

• Edit the msgQueueConfig.cfg file, located at: entuity_home/lib/messageBroker/etc 

Entuity supports streaming telemetry from the following methods: 

• Cisco Model-Driven Telemetry (MDT) 

• DMTF's Redfish 

• gNMI (gRPC Network Management Interface) 

User defined data receiver workflow

Follow this overall workflow to implement user defined data receivers: 

1. Run configure on the server, and specify the user name, password, and port of the Message Broker. 
2. Configure Telegraf on the Entuity server, and then restart the server. 
3. Configure a data source (such as a device, software-defined platform, and so on) to send data to Entuity through port 57000.
4. Define a user defined data receiver, either through the Entuity UI or with the Entuity RESTful API functionality.
   The data receiver can then populate user-defined sub-objects or attributes with the protocol defined by the supported input plugins.  

User defined data receiver functionality 

One data receiver is defined for each data source, as the data receiver processes all incoming messages from that source. If a device is configured to send more than one type of record, each type of record is displayed as a different data source. 

There are two types of data receivers:

• Sub-Object Creation data receiver
• Attributes Only data receiver

Through the Sub-Object Creation data receiver type, you can define a data receiver that creates one or more subcomponents associated with an existing object (device or otherwise) managed within the Entuity StormWorks data model. Each time a message is received, the subcomponents are created, and the data receiver populates attributes on the subcomponents, as specified.

Through the Attributes Only data receiver type, you can define a data receiver that populates one or more attributes added to a single associated component attached to the target device. Each time a new message is received, the value of these attributes is updated.

A data receiver can contain multiple steps, and is required to have at least one step. There are three step types:

• Object Creation step - (Applicable to the Sub-Object Creation data receiver type.)  Defines the type of sub-objects to be created by the data receiver.
• Attribute Population step - (Applicable to the Attributes Only data receiver type.) Defines how attributes are populated by the data receiver.
• Set Up step - (Applicable to both the Sub-Object Creation and Attributes Only data receiver types.) Populates variables that you can then access in later steps.

User permissions 

You must have admin privileges or User Defined Polling tool permission to create or modify user defined data receivers. See this article for information about user permissions in Entuity. 

Licensing 

If a user defined data receiver is added to a device that is already managed by Entuity, and the managed device consumed a license, then no license credit is charged. 

If a user defined data receiver is added to a custom device, because custom devices do not consume any device credits, then one object license credit is consumed per user defined data receiver applied to the custom device. 

Each sub-object created by a Sub-Object Creation data receiver consumes one Objects license credit, regardless of the type of parent object to which the receiver is attached (and regardless of whether the parent object consumes a license credit). 

See this section for more information about licensing in Entuity.