Simple Network Management Protocol

Management Information Base

A Management Information Base (MIB) is a container of objects, each of which represents a particular type of information. This collection of objects contains information required by a management system. For example, one MIB object represents the number of active sessions on an agent; another represents the amount of available hard drive space on the agent. All of the information that a management system might request from an agent is stored in various MIBs.

A MIB defines the following values for each object it contains:

Name and identifier.
Defined data type.
A textual description of the object.
An index method used for complex data type objects (usually described as a multidimensional array or as tabular data).
Examples of complex data are a list of all the network interfaces configured into the system, a routing table, or the Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) table.
Read/write permissions.

Each object in a MIB has a unique identifier that includes the following information:

Type (counter, string, gauge, or address).
Access level (read or read/write).
Size restriction.
Range information.

The Windows 2000 SNMP service supports the Internet MIB II, LAN Manager MIB II, Host Resources MIB, and Microsoft proprietary MIBs.

For more information about the Windows 2000–based MIBs and descriptions of MIB objects, see "MIB Object Types" in this book.