UNIX® Fault Management: A Guide for System Administration

Using System Instrumentation

Standards for network and system management, such as the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) and the Desktop Management Interface (DMI), have been developed to help make management easier. These standards provide an industry-standard way to build instrumentation, and an industry-standard way to interface into the instrumentation. SNMP is used to access Management Information Bases (MIBs), and DMI is used to access Management Information Formats (MIFs).

Standard MIBs and MIFs define the metrics that can be provided by any vendor. The information provided is generally referred to as instrumentation. Private MIBs and MIFs pro vide vendor-specific instrumentation. This section looks at some of the disk instrumentation ...