Mibs & Oids - Solarwinds training - Network performance monitor

In this section, we will begin our discussion of using Universal Device Pollers by talking about MIB's and OID's, what they are, what they are used for, and how to use them with the Orion® Universal Device Poller. The Universal Device Poller feature is available through the SolarWinds Orion Program Group Network Performance Monitor. The Universal Device Poller allows the user to create custom monitors for almost any statistic provided via SNMP based on its MIB and OID. So what are MIB's and OID's? MIB is short for Management Information Base. The MIB is the structure that describes all the objects a device can report on. In this context, an object represents a statistic within the device such as a CPU, fan, temperature, and so on. The MIB contains the name, data type, and object identifier or OID. As mentioned, an OID is the object identifier, basically an numeric value assigned to the object being monitored. You can think of it as a unique identifier to retrieve that specific value. SolarWinds maintains a MIB database that is routinely updated. The MIB database is a large repository of MIB's and OID's used to monitor a wide variety of information about devices and their performance outside of the standard monitoring performed for most devices. The SolarWinds MIB database comes with Orion, and updates are free for current customers under maintenance. Updates can be downloaded directly from the Customer Portal, but adding the custom MIB's is not needed for standard device support. SolarWinds also offers a feature to detect and manage MIB's and OID's on network devices called a MIB Walk. This feature comes with the Engineer's Toolset, and purchase of that suite is necessary to use this feature. The MIB Walk allows you to generate a table of all MIB's and OID's supported on a specific device by walking the SNMP for that target device. Once identified, the OID's can be used to create custom monitors, also referred to as pollers. Within the Engineers Toolset, the MIB Viewer would download and display any MIB variable from a specific device. OID's can be identified using this application as well. [©2012 SolarWinds Worldwide, LLC. All Rights Reserved.]