Define Entities

An entity represents something that can be observed and monitored within your business and systems domain. Each entity declaration must include the metrics and events that are associated with that entity.

Considerations for Modeling an Entity

• Every entity declaration must also include a resource mapping section -- in other words, a section that specifies how to map OTLP data to the entity's attributes.
• Choose a set of attributes that uniquely identifies the entity but limits the cardinality. For example, for an AWS database entity, the AWS ID attribute would uniquely identify it; for a Kubernetes entity, namespace, service, and service.instance would uniquely identify it. Entities can have non-identifying attributes as well.

The Cisco Observability Platform needs to associate incoming MELT data with fmm:entity knowledge objects. To define an fmm:entity object for your solution:

1. In a new file, <your-solution-name>/fmm/objects/entity.json, define a knowledge object of type fmm:entity.

2. Add the new fmm:entity object to your solution:

   1. Make the following changes to your solution manifest file (<your-solution-name>/manifest.json):

      1. In dependencies, add fmm.
      2. In objects, add this snippet:

      {
        "type": "fmm:entity",
        "objectsFile": "fmm/objects/entity.json"
      }
      

   2. Validate manifest.json with the command fsoc solution validate.

Shortcut To create <your-solution-name>/fmm/objects/entity.json with an empty fmm:entity, run the fsoc solution extend command from the root folder of your solution:

fsoc solution extend –-add-entity=<entity-name>

where <entity-name>:

• Must start with an alphabetical character.
• Can only contain alphabetical characters and numbers.
• Can contain a maximum of 25 characters.

To add multiple entities, run the fsoc solution extend command multiple times. For example:

fsoc solution extend --add-entity=simplebox
fsoc solution extend --add-entity=simplerock
fsoc solution extend --add-entitysimplemarble

Learn More

• Data Modeling