Customizing Asset Management › Management Information Format (.MIF) Files › Usage of MIF Files in Asset Management › How MIF files Are used in Template Inventory

How MIF files Are used in Template Inventory

Template inventory modules let you collect customized inventory information from a MIF file; information which is not collected by any of the inventory detection modules. Asset management uses the following process to store and retrieve the information from the MIF files. By understanding these actions, you can choose how to best configure the MIF files as per your requirements:

• The asset management agent creates a MIF file for each template inventory when executing a template inventory collect task to store the collected inventory information.
• The agent software processes every MIF file placed in the local computer or user directory. Asset management uses a compression algorithm to reduce the size of these .MIF files and thus speeds up the file transmission. The compressed files have the same file name as the MIF files but have the extension .MNV and are stored in the BAK directory of the computer or user.

  Note: The agent processes only the .MIF files that fulfill the DMI specification.

• If the agent runs for the first time or if the BAK directory is deleted, the agent sends the full inventory to the scalability server. You can also manually send a notification for collecting full inventory. In all the other cases, only differential value is sent. The BAK directory contains the information with which the agent compares the current inventory values with the previous scan values.
• The differences between current and previously collected inventory values are sent to the scalability server which is available under ...\ServerDB\SECTOR\COLLECT.
• The engine collects this information from the collect area and updates the domain database accordingly.

More information:

Create, Configure, and Schedule Template Inventory

Inventory Template Modules

Recollect Inventory