Resource Discovery and Inventory

Resources are managed through discovery and inventory. Discovery data identifies and classifies the resource, while inventory data defines specific information about the resource. Each resource type can provide discovery data and inventory data.

The following table shows the default resource types used by Microsoft® Systems Management Server (SMS).

Resource type	Description
System	Computers and other hardware resources found on the network
User	Microsoft® Windows NT® user accounts
User Group	Windows NT user groups

The SMS resource model is extensible to accommodate new resource types (architectures). You can report both discovery and inventory data for a new resource type, but you should always report discovery data and only optionally report inventory data. In general, you should limit discovery data to low-volume data that identifies and classifies a resource. All other data, especially high-volume data, should be reported as inventory data.

If you do not implement an inventory strategy, your resource discovery process must collect all the inventory information that you want to track; you are encouraged to limit the number of properties to 20. If you do implement an inventory strategy, your resource discovery process should collect the minimum information required to identify the resource, and the inventory process should report the rest.

You can use discovery data records (DDRs) to add discovery data to an existing resource type or to create a new resource type. For more information, see Discovery Data Records.

You must use IDMIFs to report inventory data for non-system resources. For a complete discussion of MIF syntax and usage, see the BackOffice Resource Kit. Also, for a simple example of using the IDMIF to report inventory data for a non-system resource, see Reporting Carpool Inventory.