6.1.1 Device profiles and device attributes
As NNMi discovers devices, it uses SNMP to gather some attributes directly. One of the key attributes is the MIB II system object ID (sysObjectID). From the system object ID, NNMi derives additional attributes, such as vendor, device category, and device family.
During discovery, NNMi collects the MIB II system groups and stores them in the topology portion of the database. System capabilities are visible on the Node form. However, these capabilities are not used by the monitoring configuration. NNMi uses the device category (from the device profile for the system object ID) to match devices into node groups. In node view tables, the Device Category column identifies the device category for each node.
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If Web Agents are configured (in addition to SNMP Agents), NNMi can use additional protocols (for example, SOAP protocol for VMware environments).
NNMi ships with a large number of device profiles for system object IDs that were available at the time of release. You can configure custom device profiles for the unique devices in your environment to map these devices to category, vendor, and so forth.