Sun Identity Manager 8.1 Business Administrator's Guide

What is Data Exporter?

Identity Manager contains and processes data relevant to managing identities across distributed systems and applications. To improve overall performance, Identity Manager does not retain all of the data it generates during normal provisioning and other daily activities. For example, Identity Manager by default does not persist the intermediate status workflow activities and task instances. If it is necessary to capture all or some of the data that Identity Manager normally discards, you can enable the Data Exporter feature.

When Data Exporter is enabled, Identity Manager stores each detected change to a specified object (data type) as a record in a table in the repository. These events are queued until a task writes them to an external data warehouse. (You can configure how frequently each type of data is exported.) The exported data can be further processed or used as a basis for queries and transformations with commercial transformation, reporting, and analysis tools.

Exporting data to a data warehouse has a negative impact on the Identity Manager server’s performance, and this feature should not be enabled unless there is a business need for the exported data.

Identity Manager also allows you to create and execute forensic queries. A forensic query searches the data warehouse to identify User or Role objects that meet the criteria you specify. See Configuring Forensic Queries for more information.