1 About Unified Inventory and Topology
Unified Inventory and Topology includes the following services:
- Unified Inventory Management (UIM)
- Unified Topology for Inventory and Automation (UTIA)
- Unified Operations Message Bus
- Common Authentication that leverages Oracle Access Manager (OAM) tool
UTIA, Unified Operations Message Bus, and Common Authentication are cloud native containerized applications that are supported in a Kubernetes environment. UIM can be a traditional application or a cloud native instance.
- The embedded topology from UIM is now available as a micro-service (UTIA) based on Helidon MP.
- The communication between UIM and the UTIA service is asynchronous and this is achieved by using Message Bus service.
- OAM is an optional Identity Provider that supports OAuth2.0 protocol, used for single sign-on (SSO).
Unified Inventory and Topology Architecture
Figure 1-1 shows a high-level architecture of Unified Inventory and Topology and how the services communicate.
Figure 1-1 High-level Architecture of Unified Inventory and Topology
See the corresponding architecture diagrams of the services for more information.
About UIM
UIM is a standards-based telecommunications inventory management application that enables you to model and manage customers, services, and resources. UIM supports complex business relationships and provides full life-cycle management of services and resources. UIM provides you with a real-time, unified view of customers, services, and resource inventory, enabling you to develop and introduce new services quickly and cost-effectively. UIM supports two deployment models: traditional (on-premise) deployment and cloud native deployment in a Kubernetes cluster.
About UTIA
Unified Topology for Inventory and Automation (UTIA) enables you to view the service, network, and resource topologies in the form of topology graphs. UTIA uses Oracle Property Graph DB to manage the topology hierarchy.
UTIA has the following sub components.
- Unified Topology API
- Unified Topology PGX
- Unified Topology Consumer
- Unified Topology UI
See UTIA User’s Guide for more information.
About Unified Operations Message Bus
Message Bus is a distributed event store and stream-processing service. Message Bus service sends and receives events and messages asynchronously to a specific destination (called as Topic) between the services. The Message Bus service uses Apache Kafka, which is a distributed event store and stream-processing platform, as the messaging platform. For packaging or deploying, Strimzi is used. Strimzi simplifies the process of running Apache Kafka in a Kubernetes cluster. Strimzi also provides container images and operators for running Kafka on Kubernetes.
About Common Authentication
The Common Authentication service leverages Oracle Access Manager (OAM) or any Identity Provider to implement the single sign-on (SSO) authentication solution with the services (UIM, Unified Topology services, and Message Bus service). This enables you to seamlessly access multiple applications without being prompted to authenticate for each application separately. The main advantage of SSO is that you are authenticated only once, which is when you log in to the first application; you are not required to authenticate again when you subsequently access different applications within the same web browser session.
OAM also supports the single logout (SLO) feature. If you access multiple applications using SSO within the same web browser session, and then if you log out of any one of the applications, you are logged out of all of the applications.
For more information about OAM, see Administering Oracle Access Management.
Planning and Validating Your Cloud Environment
To deploy the Unified Topology for Inventory and Automation services, you must set up and validate a list of prerequisite software. See Planning and Validating Your Cloud Environment in UIM Cloud Native Deployment Guide for more information.
Before starting the service deployments:
- Install property graph plugins on the PDB that are used for UTIA.
- Configure the Storage Class in Kubernetes to provision Persistent Volumes dynamically to be used for the Message Bus service.
Installing Oracle Property Graph
UTIA uses Oracle Property Graph of Oracle Database that offers a powerful graph support to explore and discover complex relationships within UTIA topology graphs.
Graph Server and Client is a software package that is required for Property Graph.
To install Property Graph:
- Download Oracle Graph Server,
oracle-graph-plsql-<version>.zip, from Oracle E-Delivery: https://www.oracle.com/database/technologies/spatialandgraph/property-graph-features/graph-server-and-client/graph-server-and-client-downloads.html
Note:
The versions are available at: Oracle Graph Server. See UIM Compatibility Matrix for the corresponding version of Oracle Graph PL/SQL Patch.
- Extract oracle-graph-plsql-<version>.zip and open the 19c and above folder.
- Follow the instructions in the readme.md file to install Property Graph.