Designing MIF Files

MIF files are the key to enabling your product to be managed by the desktop system. A well designed MIF file is important.

The DMI requires that the MIF file be an ASCII text file that contains the groups and attributes that you defined for your product. You must provide all meaningful information by using the MIF file. The text in the file must follow the defined syntax and grammar.

After you decide which product attributes are manageable, define the attributes into standard groups as much as possible in the MIF file.

The DMI Specification describes attribute characteristics and options. All attributes must have these four items defined:

Name

The name of the attribute
ID
The unique, sequential attribute ID within the group containing the attribute
Type
The attribute's data type. The type is either a specific data type that DMI supports or an enumerated list that provides flexibility in the attribute definitions
Value
The actual value (to be put into the database) or a pointer to the instrumentation that gets the value

In addition, you can optionally define description, access, and storage attributes.

The description can be one or many lines. The description text should be as clear and informative as possible to provide management applications with complete information about the attribute. You need a good description at the component level and group level.

The system uses an access statement to determine whether the attribute's value is read-only, read-write, or write-only.

The storage statement provides a hint to management applications about whether to assist in optimizing storage requirements. Two options are available:

• common - you use this option to signify that the attribute value is typically limited to a small set of possibilities that you can be optimize. 
  specific - you use this option to signify that the attribute value is not a good candidate for optimization because of the possibility of a large number of different values.

  You can find the MIF file requirements in the SystemView Agent Programmer's Guide in the Toolkit in the Problem Determination Tools folder.

  ---

  [Back: Enabling Manageable Products for DMI]
  [Next: MIF Attribute Storage]