Use Tags to Define Associations Between Entities

You can define entity associations at the time you first add entities for monitoring. By adding one of two special tags within an entity JSON file, you define the entity as either a source entity or a destination entity. This source-destination pairing links two entities together--from a source entity to a destination entity.

The following two tags are used to define either a source or destination entity:

• assoc_source (Source Entity Marker tag is used for tagging source entities)

• assoc_dest (Destination Entity Marker tag is used for tagging destination entities.)

Tag Syntax:

assoc_source:<Association Hint>

assoc_dest:<Association Hint>

Once added, the tags will be visible on an entity’s home page.

where Association Hint is the unique identifier used to associate two entities. The Association Hint used for the source entity must match the one specified for the destination entity.

You can specify up to 50 tags per entity. For each tag key:value pair, you can specify up to 128 characters for the key and 256 characters for the value.

Usage Example

You have an environment with five WebLogic servers and two databases. For the five WebLogic servers, the following tag is used to mark them as source entities:

assoc_source:my_prod_dbs.

For the two databases, the following tag is used to mark them as destination entities:

assoc_dest:my_prod_dbs.

These tags will create associations between each WebLogic server and the two databases.

Note:

The Association Hint must be unique for each entity type.

Once you’ve defined the entity associations and added the entities, you can view them in the topology map.

Add Association Tags to Entity JSON Files

As discussed above, you create the association when you add a new entity. The following JSON file examples illustrate how the tags are implemented in the entity JSON files. The examples used in the following steps create a tagged relationship between a host and a database.

Step 1: Define a Source

The first step is to define the association source. The following example shows how the source tag is implemented in a host JSON.

{
    "entities":
        [
             {
                      "name": "<Your local host name that was used for agent install>",
                      "type": "<Your host Type>",
                      "properties":{
                              "capability": {
                              "displayName": "capability",
                              "value": "monitoring"
                             }
                        },
    "tags": {
       "assoc_source:tj_host" : ""
   }

              }
      ]
}

Step 2: Define an association destination.

To define an association destination, you add a tags section to the destination entity’s JSON file using the assoc_dest tag to identify the entity as a destination. The following example shows how a tag section is added to a database destination JSON for the host shown in the previous step.

Example: Database JSON Destination Tag

The following example shows the database destination is associated with the source host entity named “tj_host”.

{
   "entities":[
      {
         "name":"OracleDb_Tag",
         "type":"omc_oracle_db",
         "displayName":"OracleDb",
         "timezoneRegion":"PDT",
         "credentialRefs":[
            "SQLCreds"
         ],
         "properties":{
            "host_name":{
               "displayName":"dummy",
               "value":"abcde.myco.com"
            },
            "port":{
               "displayName":"Port",
               "value":"15212"
            },
            "sid":{
               "displayName":"SID",
               "value":"db1212"
            },
            "capability":{
               "displayName":"capability",
               "value":"monitoring"
            }
         },
   "tags": {
       "assoc_dest:tj_host" : ""
   }
      }
   ]
}