Preparing to enable Business Automation Insights

You need to access the deployment of the Business Automation Insights and extract information before you configure Content event emitter for your FileNet® P8 environment.

Before you begin

Make sure that you have access to the Kubernetes-based deployment of Business Automation Insights. Make sure that you can log on to the Kubernetes cluster and run kubectl commands.

About this task

In a container environment, you can deploy a Content event emitter with any of the following operators:
  • The FNCM operator from a FileNet P8 container environment, or,
  • The CP4BA multi-pattern operator or the CP4BA Content operator from a IBM Cloud Pak for Business Automation deployment.
An event emitter when deployed together with Business Automation Insights (BAI) can be automatically configured by default.
Preparing for an FNCM operator in a FileNet P8 container environment
You need to supply an additional configmap to allow the operator to automatically include the Kafka connection configuration file within the CPE deployment to match with the information from the BAI deployment. If the custom resource (CR) YAML was not configured to have the operator initialize the object store by using the CR parameter oc_cpe_obj_store_enable_content_event_emitter, the content event emitter must be configured manually.
Preparing for ICP4BA environment
For ICP4BA operators, the configmap is created automatically with the deployment of BAI without needing additional information about the BAI deployment.
Preparing for traditional WebSphere® Application Server environment
For CPE instances that are deployed with traditional application servers, the matching Kafka configuration from the BAI deployment needs to be created manually. Also with traditional application servers, the content event emitter must be configured manually. For more information, see Enabling Business Automation Insights.

Procedure

To gather the information required to create the configmap for the FNCM operator in a FileNet P8 container environment:

  1. Make sure that you have access to certain artifacts from the BAI deployment.
    The default name of the artifacts is mentioned in the procedure and the names can be different for your deployment. You need to access the following artifacts from your BAI deployment:
    Table 1. BAI artifacts
    Description Kubernetes resource kind Default name ICP4BA Default name FNCM
    Foundation shared information configmap ibm-cp4ba-shared-info ibm-bai-foundation-shared-info
    Kafka services connection credentials secret kafka-iaf-connection-secret kafka-iaf-connection-secret
    Kafka services certificate secret iaf-system-cluster-ca-cert iaf-system-cluster-ca-cert
  2. Access a client machine that has access to the Kubernetes cluster where BAI is deployed.
  3. Create a folder on the client machine and go to the newly created folder.
    The created folder that contains the files created as part of this procedure. For example:
    mkdir BAI_Kafka_config
cd BAI_Kafka_config
  4. Log in to the cluster and namespace where the Kubernetes-based BAI is deployed.
  5. Retrieve the subsection with key bai_kafka_configuration from the foundation shared information configmap and save as a text file. 
    kubectl get configmap/ibm-bai-foundation-shared-info -o jsonpath='{.data.bai_kafka_configuration}' -n namespace > ./bai_kafka_info.txt
  6. Retrieve the Kubernetes secret for the Kafka connection as a YAML file.
    The name of the secret appears in the BAI Kafka configuration information that you retrieved as the value associated with the key connection_secret_name.
    kubectl get secret/kafka-iaf-connection-secret -o yaml -n namespace > ./bai_kafka_secret.yaml
  7. Retrieve the Kafka services certificate as a file.
    This enables creation of a secure communication between the Kafka services and content event emitters.
    kubectl get secret/iaf-system-cluster-ca-cert -n namespace -o "jsonpath={.data.ca\.crt}" | openssl enc -d -base64 -A > ./bai_kafka-iaf-ca.crt
    Note: The Kafka components from BAI support only self-signed certificates that are generated from BAI.
  8. Save the folder as a zip package that can be used later. 
    cd ..
zip -rv ./BAI_Kafka_config.zip ./BAI_Kafka_config/