4.5 Understanding Collectors

Identity Governance provides a large set of collector templates that contain default data and configuration settings for many common enterprise and cloud data sources. Every collector has the following common configuration elements:

For more information about configuring specific data source collector templates, see:

Because each application might have its own format for the data that you plan to collect, you might need to transform the data during the data collection process. For example, the application might store dates as a string (20151202) that needs to be converted to the Identity Governance date format, which is the Java Date format in milliseconds. Also, an application might use field lengths that do not match the field length in Identity Governance. These variations in collected data affect your ability to use the data or merge it with data collected from other sources.

Transformation scripts may be added to any mapped data field in any data collector by clicking on the ‘{}’ icon next to the field mapping. This will expand the dialog to allow you to either upload a transformation file or paste in transformation text. If required, you can also delete a transformation script after removing all references to the script from the attribute mapping(s) that use it.

The transforms are done through Nashorn-compatible Javascript. Within the Javascript, you can access the collected value by creating a variable name inputValue. After manipulating the collected value, you can return the value to Identity Governance by assigning the value to a variable name outputValue.

The following example translates the values true and false from the connected system to active and inactive in the Identity Governance catalog.

if (inputValue == 'true') {
    outputValue = 'active';
}
else {
    outputValue = 'inactive';
}

For more information about transformations, see Collected Data Transformations reference.

When creating, updating, or troubleshooting data collectors, you can test all or part of the collections without publishing the results to the catalog. When you test a collection, you either ensure that the collector is correctly configured, or you have the ability to change the collector configuration and quickly test again to check the results.

You can view the collected data as soon as the test collection completes, or you can download the results to view later. Results of test collections remain available in Identity Governance until you delete them.

When you run a test collection, you have some options for the test data:

You can more easily troubleshoot collection configuration outside your production environment by creating emulation packages for data collectors. An emulation package contains CSV files with the raw collected data from the data source and a CSV file containing data source configuration details. Emulation packages remain available in Identity Governance until you delete them.

The ability to download and import collectors helps you manage your environment in several ways.

Configuring collectors can take time, and you might go through several iterations of trial and error. When you have configured a collector that achieves the results you want, you should download it and save it with your other backup files. You can also use downloaded collectors to replicate an environment, either in a test environment or to use in another office location.

You could decide that you need to change the predefined attribute mappings and value transformation policies of a template to meet your specific environment. If you find that you need to customize a collector template, rather than only editing the values in a collector, you can download and import collector templates under Configuration in Identity Governance. For more information, see Customizing the Collector Templates for Data Sources.

When you download a data source, the zipped file has the name of the data source. For example, AD_Identities.zip. The files within the zipped file are generically named in English and can include the following files: