Using DITA XML, IT organizations can effectively integrate data from IT infrastructure monitoring tools into their documentation, enhancing the comprehensiveness and accuracy of technical content.

Structured Data Integration

DITA’s modular structure accommodates the integration of structured data from monitoring tools. This is particularly valuable for documenting IT systems’ health, performance, and status. Organizations can define DITA elements to represent monitoring data such as server statistics, network latency, or system uptime. These data elements can be included within DITA topics alongside textual content, creating a unified and informative document.

Data Transformation

To integrate data from monitoring tools, transformation processes may be necessary. This can involve converting raw data into structured formats compatible with DITA. For example, data collected in JSON or XML can be processed and transformed into DITA-compliant elements. This transformation ensures that monitoring data seamlessly fits into the documentation while maintaining consistency and accessibility.

Example:

Here’s an example of integrating monitoring data into DITA documentation:

<topic id="server-status">
  <title>Server Status</title>
  <data-stats>
    <cpu-usage>12%</cpu-usage>
    <memory-usage>35%</memory-usage>
    <uptime>30 days 8 hours</uptime>
  </data-stats>
  <content>
    <p>Below are the current server statistics:

    <ul>
      <li>CPU Usage: <data value="cpu-usage" /></li>
      <li>Memory Usage: <data value="memory-usage" /></li>
      <li>Uptime: <data value="uptime" /></li>
    </ul>
  </content>

In this DITA topic, monitoring data related to CPU usage, memory usage, and uptime is integrated. The structured data is presented within the content and can be easily updated as monitoring tools collect new information.