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So I'm reading the MIB. What information am I looking for?

You don't need to carefully read over every last line of the MIB file. For your purposes, you're only looking for particular items that will tell you what elements of the device you can monitor and control.

A well-written MIB will be divided into sections. Sections will be identified by comment lines. (In MIB notation, comments lines are identified by two hyphens.) So if you find a line that reads something like:

-- TRAP definitions

You know you've found what you're looking for.

There are also text labels that identify the MIB objects you're interested in. For example, in SNMP v1 MIBs, Traps are identified by the text label "TRAP-TYPE." If you know the text labels for the kinds of objects you're looking for, you can scan the MIB in a series of Ctrl-F searches.

The MIB objects you need to know

From the perspective of a telemetry manager, what you need to know from the MIB is:

1. What other RFC MIBs you need to support this device
2. What event reports (Traps) the device can send to the SNMP manager
3. What information you can request from the device (the SNMP equivalent of an alarm poll)
4. What characteristics of the device you can control via SNMP

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