Device Assets

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Modern devices provide hundreds or even thousands of settings, operations and events. Such a large number of resources requires some kind of grouping for convenient management. In AggreGate, groups of device resources are called Device Assets.

Assets are organized in a hierarchical tree-like structure. If a certain device driver supports assets, it provides the list of root assets, each of them having a list of children assets. System operators may enable/disable assets so to unsure that only necessary device data is processed.

Here are several examples of device assets:

•For SNMP devices, an asset is a MIB file supported by device. Disabling it disables reading of all OIDs defined in the MIB file.
•Each asset of a WMI device is a single WMI class. If the asset is enabled, system exposes properties/methods/events of all instances of this class.
•For BACnet devices, root assets represent BACnet object types, while child assets match object instances. Thus, it's possible to disable processing of both whole object types and individual instances.
•Every group of OPC Server properties is represented by a separate asset. Child assets are property subgroups.

Managing Device Assets

There are two ways to enable/disable device assets:

•The asset list may be initially edited during device account creation
•Assets of existing device accounts may be managed via Edit Device Properties action

Re-reading Device Assets

The list of device assets is read from hardware only once during device account creation and cached on the server. It's not re-read even during full synchronization cycles in order to maximize system performance. To force re-reading information about device assets (e.g. after device reconfiguration) use Reset Device Driver action.