The Link and Connection Inference adapter is composed of inference engines, which is a program that performs a targeted type of connection inference. Most inference engines attempt to derive or infer connections based on specific network data stored in the NetIM database. For example, the IP Address Engine examines IP addresses to infer connections and the Neighbor Discovery Engine examines neighbor protocol information such as CDP neighbor tables to infer connections.

In most cases, the inference engines operate independently of each other. After the inference engines complete, the Link and Connection Inference adapter combines the output of the different engines to create a list of links for import into NetIM.