Author Topic: Sync Sparx tags with an external CMDB  (Read 2121 times)

didier.pironet

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Sync Sparx tags with an external CMDB
« on: June 01, 2022, 01:48:23 am »
Hi guys,
Reaching out the forum for a concern that landed in my basket.
We need to synchronize some of authoritative Sparx tags we set on a bunch of application components to our our group CMDB.
We have a 'classy' on-prem setup (EA Unified Ed) with floating licenses, Oracle DB and EA client distributed as a Citrix published app.

The group CMDB exposes some API's that we plan to use to achieve that sync.

The idea would be to develop some code (JAVA, .NET or VBS) that would read from the DB and put/post the tags to the group CMDB.

You may have already gone through same kind of request!
I'm looking for any tip, advice, attention point you would like to share.

Thanks a lot!


Geert Bellekens

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Re: Sync Sparx tags with an external CMDB
« Reply #1 on: June 01, 2022, 02:36:03 pm »
We've done something similar with our CMDB Topdesk.
We kept it pretty low tech and generated a bunch of Excel files from EA.
Those Excel files are then (at a later point) imported into Topdesk.

One of the main reasons to go for this approach is that we needed to take a snapshot when the model for a certain release is finished, but we only need to upload these when that release is actually put into production.

Geert

PS. Oracle is a really bad idea as the backend for EA and is usually very very slow. If it takes a long time to load a large diagram (more than 3 seconds) then that is because of the Oracle backend. Switch to something like SQL Server (or any of the other supported databases) and your users will thank you.

Sunshine

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Re: Sync Sparx tags with an external CMDB
« Reply #2 on: June 02, 2022, 08:04:29 pm »
We take a similar low tech approach to Geert creating csv files and using Javascript to do the import via an api.

From past experience I concur with Geert that Sparx EA doesn't perform well with Oracle. We had an Oracle wizard spend months trying to get it to perform but alas he gave up despite claiming Oracle is the best database in the world.
However to be fair we haven't tried v16 with Oracle dB.
Happy to help
:)

qwerty

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Re: Sync Sparx tags with an external CMDB
« Reply #3 on: June 02, 2022, 08:43:39 pm »
However to be fair we haven't tried v16 with Oracle dB.
Unlikely to change. Orcale is made to deal with large bulk queries from big warehouses or so. It can't cope with chatty birds like EA. Maybe the next Orcale version. But never the next EA version will make a difference. Both anyhow likely as hell freezing over.

q.

didier.pironet

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Re: Sync Sparx tags with an external CMDB
« Reply #4 on: June 02, 2022, 10:30:28 pm »
Thank you for your feedback guys.
Pardon the noob question but I thought that OSLC restful API could be a solution to retrieve such information rather than using CSV model or the legacy direct DB connection.
Am I mixing up things here or is it just that OSLC API is too much of an hassle to 'just' retrieve tags!?

Geert Bellekens

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Re: Sync Sparx tags with an external CMDB
« Reply #5 on: June 02, 2022, 11:22:40 pm »
Yeah, true, the OSLC might work as well.

Pretty complicated stuff though.

Geert