Configure Core Admin Components
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Explain the primary function of a Secure Agent.
- Define the common Intelligent Data Management Cloud terms.
- Recognize common real-world scenarios that require an administrator.
Process Data Behind Your Firewall With Secure Agent
While orgs provide the car registration and chassis for the overall structure, sub-orgs are the separate interior compartments, runtime environments provide the engine block, the Secure Agent provides the engine cylinders. It’s a lightweight application installed behind your organization’s firewall. It acts as the secure link between your local, on-premises databases and the cloud. While you design your data logic in the cloud-based browser interface, the Secure Agent actually moves and processes the data.
A Secure Agent handles the following tasks.
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Data processing: It executes tasks such as ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) and data replication.
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Security: It ensures that your data remains behind your firewall. Only metadata and status are sent to Informatica Cloud, while the actual data records stay within your controlled environment.
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Connectivity: It acts as a bridge between your on-premises systems or cloud resources and Informatica Cloud.
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Microservices architecture: It runs microservices that you can enable or disable based on your requirements.
Secure Agent automatically updates to the latest version, so you don’t have to manually upgrade or patch it.
Core Administration Terms
Get familiar with common Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) terms.
Term |
Description |
|---|---|
User |
An individual account that allows secure access to the organization. |
Role |
A set of privileges that’s assigned to users or groups that define their access and capabilities. |
Assets |
Any resource or item that admins can build within the platform, such as projects, folders, or connections. |
Connection |
A configuration that specifies how to connect to a data source or target, such as databases, flat files, or cloud services. |
Point of deployment (POD) |
A specific cloud provider region or data center location that hosts your organization’s Informatica services. |
Multi-tenant environment |
A multi-tenant environment, such as the Hosted Agent environment managed by Informatica, where multiple customers share the same infrastructure and runtime resources but the data and execution contexts remain isolated and secure for each customer |
Tour the User Interface
To access the Administrator service, you log into IDMC and select Administrator from the list of services. Review the Administrator service. Some of the options available in IDMC might vary based on your access privileges and licenses.
You can easily switch between other IDMC services using the service switcher located at the top left corner of the window.
Navigation Pane
The options available on the navigation pane on the left depends on the permissions that your user account has. Some pages such as Users, Roles, Groups, and others are common to all admin users.
Real-World Scenarios and Related Administrative Tasks
Here are a few examples of real-world administration scenarios.
Scenario |
Description |
Administrative Task |
|---|---|---|
New Employee Onboarding |
A new employee joins the company and needs access to all data integration tools. |
Create a user account and assign the data integration services to the user. |
Security |
You need to enable Role-Based Access Control (RBAC). |
Create custom roles and user groups and then assign specific permissions as required. |
Cloud Migration |
Your company needs to move your sales data from on-premise SQL server to a modern cloud data warehouse such as Snowflake. |
Create a connection that can be used by developers in a data integration tool. |
System Health |
You notice that all scheduled nightly data loads failed. |
Check the status of the secure agent and perform appropriate tasks to get it back online. |
Way to go! You’ve just learned about core IDMC administration essentials. With that foundation and your IDMC engine idling, it’s time to explore additional IDMC services that you can use to customize your vehicle.