Disclaimer: The examples and procedures included herein are for informational purposes and come with no support or warranty, explicit or implied.
Introduction
I was excited when I heard the San Diego platform release was going to include MID server profiles from which a MID server could be automatically provisioned. I was a little put out when I saw the fairly manual process for adding all of the settings into the MID profile, however, so I decided to try and automate that process. The result is the subject of this article.
The MID Profile
I started by looking at the different parts of a MID profile inside my San Diego instance.
For each of the related list tabs, I tracked the underlying table being populated. For each of those tables, I found the corresponding table which was populated when an actual MID server is created. For example, MID Profile Properties reside in mid_profile_property, MID server properties are in ecc_agent_property. The one tab for which I didn't see a corresponding table for running MIDs was mid_profile_wrapper_config, which is used to capture entries for the wrapper-override.conf file.
The Automation
In order to make the activities done by my automation easiest to follow, I chose a low-code approach versus a scripted solution. I created the following building blocks:
Subflows
For each of the tables related to a MID profile, I created a simple subflow which takes as input one MID server record and one MID profile record and then finds all records in the corresponding ecc_agent_* table and creates a corresponding record in the matching mid_profile_* table. For example, here is a look at the "Copy MID Properties" subflow.
I start with a "Look up Records" action to find any MID property records in ecc_agent_property which match the MID server I selected to be profiled.
I then run the result of that lookup through a "For Each Item" loop.
The "For Each Item" loop calls a "Create or Update Records" action to create/update the corresponding record in the mid_profile_property table.
I followed this same approach to create a subflow for each of the applicable tabs in the MID Server Profile page.
Actions
I defined the following custom actions for my automation:
"Ingest Windows MID File" - an action with a PowerShell step to retrieve the contents of a MID server config file from a Windows-based MID.
"Ingest Linux MID File" - an action with an SSH step to retrieve the contents of a MID server config file from a Linux-based MID. (NOTE: in order to make this work I had to place a suitable SSH credential on any Linux-based MIDs and store it in my SN instance)
"Parse Wrapper Override" - an action with a Script step to take the contents of a MID server wrapper-override.conf file and parse it into records for the mid_profile_wrapper_config table.
Main Subflow
I tied my component parts together with a main subflow -- this could also be a flow which runs from a catalog item or other appropriate trigger. The main subflow, named "Create MID Profile", takes a MID server record as an input and does the following:
Deletes any existing MID profile with a name matching the MID server name
Creates an empty MID profile named after the MID server
Retrieves the wrapper-override.conf file from the MID server using the applicable action based on the MID OS type
Parses any wrapper-override.conf settings into the mid_profile_wrapper_config table
Calls each table-specific subflow to copy applicable records from the existing MID into the profile
Conclusion
I'm finding this automation to be a nice time-saver as I play around with the new MID profile capability in San Diego. The automation is available as a scoped app via the following GitHub repo: https://github.com/willhallam-sn/sn-mid-profiler.
