Inventory data and collection profiles

IBM® Flex System Manager uses inventory collection profiles to collect inventory data from discovered resources.

After you collect inventory, you can view the inventory items, their attributes, and the values of those attributes by using the Refresh View option. The inventory items that are displayed include physical, logical, and virtual hardware; software applications, operating systems, middleware, firmware, UEFI, and diagnostic information; network information; and system-contained resources.

Note: You must discover a management module, such as CMM, before inventory items can be displayed. You cannot use SNMP to retrieve the information.

Inventory data comprises three parts: inventory item, inventory attribute, and inventory value.

Inventory item: A distinct part of a resource that makes up the whole. The inventory item might fall into the following categories: basic system information, hardware inventory, or software inventory. For example, hardware inventory might include a physical card as an inventory item.
Inventory attribute: The details about an inventory item, for example, the attributes for a physical card might include the name, the date it was last changed, a description, FRU number, manufacturer date, physical element manufacturer, physical element model, physical element serial number, and more.
Inventory value: The data associated with the inventory attribute, for example, the name of a physical card, or the serial number of the physical card.

IBM Flex System Manager uses profiles to manage the inventory collection tasks that you create and run. An inventory collection profile is a group of settings that are saved on IBM Flex System Manager that indicate the type of resources collected during the collection process. Using IBM Flex System Manager Web interface, you can run an inventory collection profile on specific systems (targets), and you can schedule a profile to run at specific times or in response to specific events. Inventory profiles make it possible to collect only a subset of all available information, which reduces network traffic and speeds up collection.

By default, IBM Flex System Manager includes the following inventory collection profiles:

All Inventory: This profile collects inventory from all resources and encompasses all the other inventory collection profiles.
Note: The All Inventory profile is the one you must run if you intend to use update manager.
All Hardware Inventory: This profile collects inventory from physical and virtual devices.
All Software Inventory: This profile collects inventory from software resources.
Basic System Information: This profile collects inventory from system resources.

These profiles are read-only. They cannot be deleted or edited. They can, however, be copied. You can use the existing profiles to create your own profiles by using the Create like option. Or you can create your own inventory collection profile without any preconfigured settings by using the Create option.