MIB Functional Area Comparison Table
Table 4-3 compares the MIBs covered in this chapter. It provides an overview of the MIBs by assigning them to the different functional areas of accounting and performance management, as described in Chapter 1, "Understanding the Need for Accounting and Performance Management." The selected MIBs can be placed in two groups: general-purpose MIBs and transport technology-specific MIBs. The general-purpose MIBs have been selected based on general availability (for example, MIB-II is supported on almost every vendor's network equipment) or special feature support (PING-MIB is very valuable in a remote monitoring environment). The technology MIBs cover Frame Relay and MPLS, because most of today's networks are based on one of these two transport protocols. CISCO-CAR-MIB and CISCO-CLASS-BASED-QOS-MIB are applicable in a quality-of-service (QoS) environment. CISCO-DATA-COLLECTION-MIB is a special solution for accounting solutions, because it makes it easy to collect large sets of data in a single operation. The voice accounting information is provided by multiple MIBs, depending on the technology (dialup, ISDN, or VoIP).
| Area/MIB | MIB-II, IF-MIB | PING-MIB | PROCESS-MIB | ENVMON-MIB, MEMORY-POOL-MIB, HEALTH-MONITOR | CAR-MIB | CB-QOS-MIB | FRAME-RELAY-DTE-MIB | MLS-TE-MIB | VOICE-DIAL- CONTROL-MIB | CISCO-CALL- HISTORY-MIB |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Device Performance Monitoring |  | | | | | | ||||
| Network Performance Monitoring | | | | | | |||||
| Service Monitoring | | | | |||||||
| User Monitoring and Profiling | | | | | | |||||
| Application Performance Monitoring and Profiling | ||||||||||
| Link Capacity Planning | | | | | | |||||
| Network-Wide Capacity Planning | | |||||||||
| Traffic Profiling and Engineering | | | | |||||||
| Peering and Transit Agreements | ||||||||||
| Destination-Sensitive Billing | | | ||||||||
| Destination-and Source-Sensitive Billing | | | ||||||||
| Quality-of-Service Billing | | | | |||||||
| Application-and Content-Based Billing | ||||||||||
| Time- or Connection-Based Billing | | | ||||||||
| Security Analysis | | | |
Table 4-3 does not compare the MIBs' features, because they are covered in detail in specific chapters (RMON MIBs, NetFlow-MIB, RADIUS MIBs, BGP Policy Accounting MIB, etc.). Chapter 12, "Summary of Data Collection Methodology," compares them.
The Cisco DATA-COLLECTION MIB is a special MIB that allows a management application to select a set of MIB object instances whose values need to be collected periodically. This applies for any area of Table 4-3 as long as other MIBs deliver the required measurements. The top flows variable (cnsTopFlows) from the NetFlow-MIB provides a mechanism that allows the Top-N flows in the NetFlow cache to be viewed in real time. It is another function related to the areas described in Table 4-3. Indeed, associated with criteria that can limit the feature to particular flows of interest, monitoring some of the top flows provides relevant details for capacity planning, security analysis, etc.
