Customizing Asset Management › Management Information Format (.MIF) Files › Usage of MIF Files in Asset Management › How MIF Files Are Used in External Asset Recognition

How MIF Files Are Used in External Asset Recognition

Asset management requires the following objects for recognizing external assets:

• An external asset definition
• A MIF file that has the asset information.

Asset management can recognize the external assets in your enterprise. An external asset is any asset other than computers and users for example, a printer. Understanding this process, helps you in configuring the MIF files for recognizing the external assets.

• The external asset definition contains a recognition item to identify the appropriate MIF file that resides in the scalability server's collect area.
• The Engine collects each MIF file in the collect area (...\ServerDB\SECTOR\COLLECT on windows and or / ServerDB/SECTOR/COLLECT on Linux).
• Checks whether the recognition item in any of the external asset definition matches the values in the MIF file
  • If a match is found, the engine collects the information configured in the external asset definition, creates a new external asset with the given name and deletes the file from the collect area.
  • If not, the engine just deletes the MIF file.

    Note: On the Linux or UNIX scalability server, the MIF file must have the file extension in uppercase, for example, my_printer.MIF; otherwise, the MIF file will not be processed.

• Creates the All External Assets node if it does not exist and creates a new external asset entry under it.