Credential Stores

Data Collector pipeline stages communicate with external systems to read and write data. Many of these external systems require sensitive information, such as user names or passwords, to access the data. When you configure pipeline stages for these external systems, you must specify the details that the stages need to connect to the system.

If you enter sensitive information directly in stage properties, you expose those details to any user with access to the pipeline. To access external systems without exposing the sensitive information, add them as secrets in a credential store and then use Data Collector credential functions in the stage properties to retrieve those values.

Defining secrets in a credential store can make it easier to migrate pipelines to another environment. For example, if you migrate multiple pipelines from a development to a production environment, you do not need to edit each pipeline with details for the production environment. You can simply replace the development credential store with the production version.

You can configure Data Collector to use multiple credential stores at the same time. Each credential store is identified by a unique credential store ID.