Download our free SNMP White Paper. Featuring SNMP Expert Marshall DenHartog.
This guidebook has been created to give you the information you need to successfully implement SNMP-based alarm monitoring in your network.
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Download White Paper Fortunately, you can ignore a lot of this gobbledygook. Here are the elements that you're interested in:
TRAP-TYPE: This tells you it's a Trap.
DESCRIPTION: This is a human-readable description of the Trap. It should give you a good basic indication of what the Trap signifies.
VARIABLES: This tells you actual information will be included in the Trap. When an actual Trap is sent, each of these variables will be paired with a numerical value that indicates its current state. A variable-and-value pair is called a variable binding.
The variables look pretty cryptic, but it's easy to find out what they mean. Each variable is a text label for an OID defined elsewhere in the MIB. You can do a Ctrl-F search for any variable term and find its definition. For example, "dpsRTUAPort" is defined in the DPS MIB like this:
dpsRTUAPort OBJECT-TYPE
SYNTAX INTEGER
ACCESS read-only
STATUS mandatory
DESCRIPTION "RTU port number."
::= {dpsRTUAlarmEntry 1}
Trap variables are your best guide to what alarms you'll get from an SNMP device. Depending on the device, the variables can be highly detailed or they can be vague summary alarms.
When reading the MIB, you'll also want to know what information you can directly request from the device, and what information you can send to the device. These functions are controlled by the SNMP commands GetRequest and SetRequest.
If you want to translate these commands into classic telemetry terms, you can roughly think of a GetRequest as an alarm poll and a SetRequest as a control command.
GetRequests and SetRequests operate on a type of element called an object-type. Object-types are called out in the MIB like this:
tmonAState OBJECT-TYPE
SYNTAX DisplayString (SIZE (8))
ACCESS read-only
STATUS mandatory
DESCRIPTION "The current alarm state."
::= {tmonAlarmEntry 4}
There are many different kinds of object-types. The specific object-types you might find in a MIB depend on the type of device, what kind of components it has, what the functions of those components, are, etc.
You're probably not going to be interested in every object-type listed in the MIB, because you're not going to be interested in everything about the device's functions.
