The common information model (CIM) is an open standard that defines how the elements managed in an IT environment are represented as a common set of "Object (programming)" objects and relationships between them.

The CIM is maintained by the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) to enable consistent management of these managed items, regardless of their manufacturer or supplier.

One way to describe CIM is to say that it allows multiple parties to exchange management information about these managed elements. However, this does not go far enough to express that the CIM not only represents these managed elements and management information, but also provides the means to actively control and manage these elements. By using a common information model, management software can be written once and work with many implementations of the common model without complex or costly conversion operations or loss of information.

The CIM standard is defined and published by the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF). A related standard is Web-Based Enterprise Management (WBEM, also defined by the DMTF) which defines a particular CIM implementation, including protocols for discovering and accessing those CIM implementations.

The CIM standard includes the CIM infrastructure specification and the CIM schema:.

Updates to the CIM scheme are published regularly.[1]​.

The CIM is the basis for most other DMTF standards (i.e., WBEM or SMASH). It is also the basis for the SMI-S standard for storage management.

Infrastructure deployments

Many vendors offer CIM implementations in various forms.

Some operating systems offer a CIM implementation, for example:

Some implementations are independent of the systems they support, for example:

There are also a growing number of CIM-related tools on the market.

Management standards based on the CIM scheme

Standardization organizations have defined management standards based on the CIM scheme:

Communication protocols used

Several protocols have been defined for messages transmitted between clients and servers. Message protocols transmit over HTTP. There are two types of messages:

CIM operations over HTTP (CIM-XML)

CIM-XML is part of the WBEM protocol family, and is standardized by the DMTF.

CIM-XML comprises three specifications:

WS management

WS-MAN is part of the WBEM protocol family, and is standardized by the DMTF.

WS-MAN comprises three specifications:

CIM-RS is part of the WBEM protocol family, and is standardized by the DMTF.

CIM-RS comprises three specifications: