Essentials Plugin
Essentials ships as an integration-adapter plugin only (no orchestrator plugin). It is the base distribution included with every Conncentric installation, providing the pipeline components that make the platform useful out of the box before any protocol-specific plugins are configured. It may also carry testing-only tools. Those are marked as such, are not supported in a production flow, and may change between releases.
Provided components
When building pipelines in the Portal, these components appear in the dropdown menus. Their configuration fields are rendered dynamically based on the plugin version installed on your Orchestrator.
| Component ID | Name | Type | What it does |
|---|---|---|---|
traffic-source-connector | Traffic Source (Testing Only) | Connector | Testing and benchmarking only, not supported in a production flow. Synthetic traffic generator with pluggable shaping and operating modes for capacity, conformance, and latency testing. See Traffic Source Connector. |
debug-log-sink | Debug Log Sink | Connector | Terminal sink used for pipeline debugging. Logs each inbound payload, or silently acknowledges messages when logging is disabled. |
header-enricher-transformer | Header Enricher | Transformer | Adds static headers to a message, or removes existing headers, without touching the payload. |
json-envelope-transformer | JSON Envelope Wrapper | Transformer | Wraps a message payload in a JSON envelope that carries the original payload plus selected metadata. |
jsonpath-condition | JSONPath Condition | Condition | Evaluates a JSONPath expression against the payload to decide whether a branch of the pipeline runs. Malformed JSON and missing paths resolve to false without throwing. |
standard-send-processor | Standard Send to Target | Processor | Triggers explicit egress to the route's target connector. Every route that needs to dispatch a message requires a send processor; without one, messages are acknowledged but never leave the pipeline. |
debug-log-send-processor | Send to Debug Sink | Processor | Terminal egress for testing. Dispatches the current message to the route's Debug Log Sink connector. |
The Essentials adapter also registers two components, test-data-generator (burst message generation) and test-data-validator (message capture and integrity checks), used by the platform's own conformance and load tests. They ship no component manifest, so they expose no display name, category, or configuration schema and do not appear in the Portal component menus. They are not configurable pipeline building blocks and are omitted from the table above.
Relationship to other plugins
Essentials is always applied first during installation. Protocol-specific plugins (FIX, Kafka) and custom bundles layer on top of it. You always have the Essentials baseline to fall back to.
See also
- Traffic Source Connector for the benchmarking workflow.
- Custom Bundles & Extensibility for how custom bundles layer on top of Essentials.