The Common Information Model (CIM) is a way to manage and visualize resources in an IT environment. It was created by the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) and follows the Object Oriented Model (OOM) methodology. CIM separates a specification and a schema to identify objects in an environment and uses the Unified Modeling Language (UML) and Managed Object Format (MOF) language to share information. The schema defines the specifics of managed environments and allows for extensions.
While quite complex in nature, the common information model (CIM) is really just a way of visualizing and managing the resources of an information technology (IT) environment, whatever that may be. Through the common information model, an organization or an end user is able to describe everything that makes up a particular IT environment, be it a web-based environment or an enterprise network. The entire complexity of the network, including the physical computer systems, other hardware needed by the environment, the software programs that run on those systems, can be defined by the CIM. While you could certainly create programs that use CIM to help organize and manage a computer network, CIM isn’t a program itself, but rather a way to bring together all of the data on a network into a more easily understood.
The Common Information Model was devised by a group of technology companies working together. After some proprietary wrangling with slightly different implementations of modeling methods, a group of IT giants led by Cisco Systems®, Hewlet-Packard® and IBM® came together to form the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF). The goal of the DMTF was to create a vendor-neutral method for managing network resources, and what came out is the common information model.
The CIM follows the Object Oriented Model (OOM) methodology. The OOM paradigm offers a way to find solutions to problems by decomposing the complexity of the problem into objects that are related and interact with each other. While OOM has found extensive use in object-oriented computer programming languages, the technique offers a robust way to work with large and fairly complex problems. Within the OOM, anything in the problem set is identified as an object, and to identify each object, definitions must be established.
The common information model identifies the objects of an environment by separating a specification and a schema. One half of the CIM, the specification, is a description of how the various management models should interact with each other and creates a sort of meta-model for sharing information and developing other management models. To help with this, the CIM specification uses the Unified Modeling Language (UML) to help with the general conceptualization and visualization of CIM models. The specification also outlines its own language which is used in defining the most common aspects of an environment such as the types of objects, their attributes and their relationships. Based on the Interface Definition Language (IDL), CIM’s Managed Object Format (MOF) language allows the user to write plaintext descriptions of objects in a human-readable format that can then be used to share information about an environment.
In the second half of the common information model, the schema then defines the specifics of the managed environments. The scheme develops from the fundamental concepts to the most common ones, but also allows for extensions of these. At its core, the specification provides the essential terminology used in the IT world, the basic concepts that can be found everywhere. As root branches, the more detailed aspects of management areas are defined, such as databases, users, devices, and so on. Separate from the core CIM schema, an extension schema can be developed that further defines a specific management area.
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