Service Manager Connectors

Kurt Van Hoecke has written up an excellent series of blog posts on the Belgium System Center User Group blog on all the connectors that are provided out of the box in Service Manager.

Part 1: Importing data into SCSM (part 1) – the SCSM AD & SCCM connectors

Part 2: Importing data into SCSM (part2) - the SCSM OpsMgr Alert connector

Part 3: Importing data into SCSM (part3) - the SCSM OpsMgr CI connector

Part 4: Importing data into SCSM (part4) – The manual & CSV import CI creation

Great work Kurt!

For more information on what data comes from each of the connectors see these parts of the online documentation:

AD connector: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg232586.aspx

SCCM connector: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg265984.aspx

SCOM connector: the data model is essentially the same as in SCOM.  If you see a CI class/property in the SCSM data model and that same class exists in the SCOM database then you can assume that it is probably coming from SCOM.

Microsoft also recently released the Exchange connector - more infromation about that here:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/servicemanager/archive/2011/01/07/exchange-connector-released.aspx 

That covers all of the out of box connectors for Service Manager.  I’d add a few more things…

1. You can also insert data through the Data Access Service using the SDK.  This CreateIncident.exe app is an example of using the SDK to insert data into Service Manager.
2. Don’t forget that you can easily extend the CMDB to store any kind of data you want and then populate that data using any of these options above depending on where the data is located.
3. Opalis acquisition – Just look at Opalis’ web site and think about the connector possibilities….  Update on connector plans.

Other blog posts on connectors:

Operations Manager Alert Connector 

Administering Connectors

Here are some examples of creating custom connectors:

• CSV Import Connector using the Service Manager workflow platform and PowerShell
• A create incident "connector"
• How to write a custom connector that integrates with the Service Manager console using wizards/property sheets - CSV Connector example