From an application's point of view, a synthetic datasource looks and acts the same as any other MDA-based datasource. However, these datasources are internal to the correlator rather than external, such as IAF adapters. Synthetic datasources generally act as filters, modifiers, or aggregators for other datasources (which may be either external adapters or other synthetic datasources).

A CMF application that uses a synthetic datasource must also use the CMF service framework. Every monitor that needs to interact with a synthetic datasource must do the following:

Failure to initialize the service framework correctly will typically lead to an application that fails intermittently and unpredictably, due to race conditions between the application code and synthetic datasources.

The mechanisms for interacting with the service framework are explained in more detail in the Service Framework. An implementation of the service framework can use the configuration service, which manages CMF and application configuration data stored in an external database. Configuration Service describes how to use the configuration service.