SNMP – What are .mib files used for, and why are there many of them for a single printer

mibprintersnmp

I am investigating methods of monitoring particular stats with printers. I am not very knowledgeable yet, and was just curious what .mib files are used for and why there are many of them for a printer?

Example: http://www.oidview.com/mibs/674/md-674-1.html

Best Answer

MIBs (Management Information Base) describe OIDs (Object Identifiers) for SNMP. Which is acronym soup. An OID turns something like

     1.3.6.1.4.1.412.2.1

Into 

     dmtf.dmtfStdMifs.dmtfServiceLayerMIF

This is useful for monitoring applications, as they know what they're looking at. MIBs also include definitions for the kind of data returned by a specific OID, so they know to translate something to Int or DateTime.

There are so many of them for a single printer because MIBs are modular, and that printer uses a wide variety of SNMP modules.

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