COSMOS UG Overview

COSMOS Wiki > COSMOS Document Plan > COSMOS Manual Guide

COSMOS User's Guide Overview

Category: User's Guide

Owner	Mark Weitzel
Bug #	218828
Due dates	Schedule

Outline

Section:

• What problems is COSMOS working to address?
  • Integration
  • Resource Modeling (for the purpose of exchanging/reconciling models)
  • Deployment
• Introduce the standards focus

Section: Addressing the integration problem

• Introduction to integration problem
  • Proliferation of custom databases
  • Proliferation of management databases
• Introduction to CMDBf

Section: Resource Modeling

The Problem

In the IT industry, there is a number of systems management applications with proprietary data formats. There has long been a need for an industry standard format for expressing and modeling configuration management data, and for exchanging this data between applications and vendors.

SML and SML-IF

Service Modeling Language (SML) is a specification, submitted to W3C, for modeling complex services and systems, including structure, policies, and constraints. SML is based on a subset of XML Schema 1.0. It includes Schematron and XPath 1.0 support for validating constraints. It also includes some new extensions of XML Schema that allow for inter-document references for expressing data relationships.

SML-Interchange Format (SML-IF) is a peer specification of the SML specification that defines the means for packaging related SML documents as an aggregate. This schema allows for large amounts of data to be easily exchanged between applications, and also provides context for the aggregate. It also gives the ability to bind SML documents to specific Schematron rules.

CMDBf's relationship to SML

The CMDBf specification defines an XML syntax for providing query results. Embedded in a query result is a configuration record containing data specific to the repository, possibly using a unique syntax. SML is a recommended syntax for expressing a configuration record, given the unique capabilities it provides over standard XML Schema. The example SML MDR provided with COSMOS makes use of SML references to highlight this capability.

SML and SML-IF in COSMOS

COSMOS provides a rich set of tooling to support working with SML and SML-IF data:

• SML-IF editor - allows you to graphically browse and navigate an SML-IF document, and serves as a hub for other SML-IF operations
• SML-IF validator - validates SML documents and SML-IF files against the specification schemas and the Schematron rules, ensuring that the syntax and data conforms to these
• SML repository - provides a flat-file based repository for storing SML documents, including a binding to CMDBf so that query service requests can be handled
• SML-IF import - allows you to import SML-IF files into the SML repository as SML documents. These SML-IF files could have been previously exported from another COSMOS SML repository or even another management application.
• SML-IF export - allows you to export SML documents from the SML repository into an SML-IF file. This is essentially the reverse operation from the SML-IF import, and allows data to be exchanged with other applications.

See the section Service Modeling Language Tooling and Usage for more information on the included tooling.

Section: Deployment

• Frame the deployment problem
• Position COSMOS to P2, Mayainstall
  • How does COSMOS work with, and/or is different from these two
• Why is SDD important.

Section: The vision of COSMOS

• Pulling it all together
  • The end-to-end demo
  • How do the standards work together
• The importance of working as a community
  • Understanding the specs
  • Shared plumbing
  • Common "platform" & building blocks
• Where are we going.....