A CASE Tool to Support the MIB Development Process

The SNMP protocol is widely used by network management applications for monitoring and controlling network devices, such as collecting statistics, managing configurations, measuring performance and setting up security. MIB (management information base) is a form of information exchanged through SNMP protocol between network management stations and agents in the device. Designing MIBs requires a great deal of expertise and usually is a time consuming process. The MIBs, after finishing designing, need to be reviewed by a group of MIB experts to ensure their correctness in order to be published outside the company. For the customers of managed equipment vendors, MIBs are one of the most important and visible management interfaces to the network devices. This paper presents a CASE tool to support the design process of the MIB to automate and accelerate the overall MIB development process. The tool offers a common umbrella to integrate all functions in MIB development, including search, design, review, implementation, unit testing, and release. Part of the tool for search, design and review has already been implemented and is discussed in detail in this paper.