Multi-tenancy in UIM can be achieved in two ways: hard tenancy and soft tenancy.
Hard tenancy is simply a separate installation (in UIM terms, “Domain”) for each Tenant. This ensure each Tenant has their own database completely separate from other Tenants. While this model is simple to understand, it increases the required administrative overhead in a service provider (SP) environment.
Soft tenancy utilizes a single Domain for multiple tenants, with the data ownership determined by its “Origin” - all messages flowing through UIM are tagged with an Origin attribute.
Origin values may be set at the Hub (where the default is the name of the Hub, derived from the Hub host’s hostname) or on the Robot (where there is no default value). Origins are then mapped to Accounts/Contacts such that when a user logs into the Unified Monitoring Portal (UMP), they see data only for the Origins they are allowed.
The out-of-the-box (OOTB) settings are not suitable for SP environments - the UIM architect should consider multi-tenancy in planning the deployment - by starting with the CA UIM Implementation Reference Architecture (either Two-Tier or Three-Tier), the UIM architect has a good foundation for deploying a multi-tenanted solution.
The general rules of thumb are as follows:
1. Assign each Tenant one or more Hubs (depending size of environment) with a matching Origin value, for example, the Tenant Company Name (e.g. “Acme”)
2. If it’s not practical to assign a Hub to a Tenant, override the Origin value on the Tenant’s Robots (whether the Robots have local or remote monitoring probes, all messages on the Robot get the overridden Origin value).
3. As a last resort, if you must have a Robot running remote monitoring probe(s) against multiple Tenants’ devices, you must use the alarm_enrichment and qos_processor probes to correct the value of the Origin data attribute.