Function Types

Streams contain three types of functions:

  • Collectors
    • Consist of industry standard protocol interfaces as well as adapters to enterprise services in the cloud for fast and easy integration with sources to ingest data.
    • Responsible for gathering data into the stream from data sources or the client of a bi-directional real-time flow.
    • An example of a collector function could be one that reads files from Amazon S3and sends its contents into the stream.
  • Processors
    • Processors include data transformation functions to improve the quality of data, normalize it, aggregate it,and enrich it with other streams of data.
    • In addition, Usage Engine supports programmable aids to design customized functionality that may be needed in the solution.
    • An example of a processor function could be the Deduplicate Function that aims to achieve data quality by removing  duplicate records from the processing data.
  • •Forwarders
    • Forwarders are protocol support and adapters to connect to a variety of destinations, including cloud billing systems, data warehouse, and other enterprise services in the cloud to distribute.
    • Responsible for distributing the data from the stream to other systems or devices.
    • An example ofa forwarder function could be one that creates a file from a data stream and transfers it to another system using SFTP.

Function types