Inventory adapters (also known as topology adapters) gather topology data from an inventory system that is part of the OSS environment in an optical-based service provider or enterprise. Depending on operator environment, the inventory system might provide a complete inventory of devices, including physical and logical connections; or it might provide a subset of topology data that describes the links between devices that are managed by different element managers, and/or end-to-end circuits that can pass over multiple vendor devices. The output of the Inventory adapter gets read by the Topology Server.
Inventory adapters can be implemented that collect topology data from a variety of sources including: flat file, XML, database, and API. Inventory adapters can support bulk loading, scoped loading, and inventory update events.
