General Procedure for Writing Audit Collection Plug-ins

To ensure that you develop audit collection plug-ins correctly, follow this procedure.

The general procedure for writing collection plug-ins is:

  1. Know what capability you want to add to Oracle Database Security Central, a new target type or a new audit trail for an existing target type.

  2. Check if Oracle provides a plug-in that does what you want. If so, then use it.

    Continue only if the plug-in you need does not exist.

    Note:

    Do not create version-dependent target types. Version-dependent target types are different target types written to use for different versions of the same software. If you create version-dependent target types, then Oracle Database Security Central is unable to collect from the target after it is upgraded to a different version.

    For example, suppose that you create the version-dependent target types SQL Server 2000 and SQL Server 2005 and a collection plug-in that collects the audit trail from a SQL Server 2000 target. If you upgrade that target to SQL Server 2005, then Oracle Audit Vault agent cannot collect its audit trail.

  3. Understand the events that your target type writes and their fields.

    Use appropriate existing events and fields when you write your plug-in (for examples of existing events and fields. If the events or fields you need are not available, you can use extension fields. Oracle, from time to time, evaluates the set of fields that Audit Vault supports, and may add new fields if they apply to a broad set of target types. If you believe your fields satisfy this criterion, please contact Oracle Support.

  4. Decide which type of collection plug-in to write.

  5. Set up the development environment.

  6. Learn more about the type of plug-in you are creating.

    Refer to “Java-Based Audit Trail Collection Plug-ins” for information about Java-based plug-ins

  7. Determine the following for your collection plug-in:

    • How to connect to the target.

    • How to interrogate the target to learn what you must know.

    • Which platforms your plug-in will support.

  8. Decide whether your plug-in will support audit trail cleanup.

  9. Set up the collection plug-in parameters.

    For Java-based plug-ins, write the relevant code.

  10. Create a plug-in manifest file to describe the collection plug-in.

  11. Run the avpack utility to package the plug-in.

  12. Test the plug-in the staging environment.

  13. If the plug-in works, then make it available to the Oracle Audit Vault administrator to deploy in the development environment, using the command-line commands.

    See Also:

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