IMG 1010 - What are MIBs ?

What are MIBs ?

You start at the top and add the name of each branch until you get to the variable you want to address. To address Dialogic through SNMP the address is: iso.org.dod.internet.private.enterprises.cantata.

You can append information to a node to extend the tree, as much as you need. The MIBs for a specific company's device are called an enterprise MIB.

Standards have been made describing the format of common data. These are called standard MIBs. A special set of these MIBs are called MIB-II. These are MIBs for data you would expect every network device to have such as Ethernet, TCP, and UDP.

Network Management Systems (NMS) are already set up for Standard MIBs, so if a new device supports standard MIBs you can just plug it into the network. All your existing high-level applications can work with the device.

For an enterprise MIB you can query the data and look at it as numbers on a screen but your higher-level NMS apps won't have any idea what the data means until you write software that interprets the values.