SNMP is a tricky animal and if you are working on setting up any sort of monitoring you will need a tool to browse MIB files. The MIB file is a file that essentially converts strings of SNMP numbers known as OID's into human readable format. Sadly the choice of tools for working with these files is very limited. Many MIB tools are woefully outdated and many will not run on Windows 10.

We recommend iReasonaing MIB Browser. This tool is the best of the options in our opinion. It runs on all modern Windows operating systems and there is also a version available for Mac. You have the ability to load MIB files and then browse the files to find the OID's that you want to work with. In addition, it allows you to see the data types clearly which is essential when you are working with MIBs that use the common table format. This allows the ability to store a set of values for numerous objects.

A good example of the use of a table in a MIB is to store data about a network interface. You may have a MIB for a switch and there may be many network interfaces. With a table you can have the data stored in a table and each interface becomes a row in the table where there are multiple fields which describe the properties of each interface.

Walking your MIBS...

What makes this tool even more useful is the ability to "walk" a server and identify all OID's that are returned by an SNMP query. The data returned is shown in the pane on the right. When you see a piece of interesting data you can double click the data on the right to expand the tree on the left and see the exact OID for the returned data and all the details. This is one of the quickest ways that we have seen in any MIB tool for exploring and discovering the properties of an SNMP device.

Versions

There are 3 versions of the iReasoning MIB browser - Free, Professional and Enterprise. Get started with the free version and try things out. You will most likely want to spring for the Professional version since the free version limits you to 10 open MIB files at a time. This is usable but you can save a lot of time by loading all the MIBs you regularly use and not be loading an unloading files all the time. Click HERE for a page showing the features for all three versions.