Recently fellow champion Ioannis Theodoridis asked around how to find out what SNMP MIB’s are supported by a specific Cisco network device. And although model driven telemetry is gaining momentum, many monitoring systems still rely on SNMP. And finding those MIB’s can be a challenge. I found out a very easy method to quickly find which MIBs are supported.
To get started, you need your CCO credentials by hand and an outbound FTP client. In this blog I’m using the terminal app on my mac.
1. Connect via FTP to ftp.cisco.com and login with your own CCO credentials, set FTP to passive
pr-mbp15-001:Desktop nefkensp$ ftp ftp.cisco.com
Connected to ftp.cisco.com.
220-
220- Cisco Systems File Transfer Service.
--- SNIP ---
220 download-prod1-03.cisco.com FTP Server (Apache/2.2) ready.
Name (ftp.cisco.com:nefkensp): nefkensp
331 Password required for nefkensp
Password:
230 User nefkensp logged in
ftp> passive
Passive mode on.
ftp>
2. now go to the directory “/pub/mibs/supportlists”
ftp> cd /pub/mibs/supportlists
250 CWD command successful.
ftp>
3. Do a directory listing (long) and enter the directory for your device. The device listing is long, I selected a new Cat9k switch in this example
ftp> ls
200 PORT: Command successful
150 Opening ASCII mode data connection for file list
drwxrwxr-x 2 swdsadm cisco 4096 Jan 7 2002 2948g-13
drwxrwxr-x 2 swdsadm cisco 4096 Jan 8 2002 4908g-13
drwxrwxr-x 2 swdsadm cisco 4096 Dec 20 2000 90i
drwxrwxr-x 2 swdsadm cisco 4096 Apr 19 2011 CTXSystem
drwxrwxr-x 2 swdsadm cisco 4096 Jan 6 2003 ONS15530
drwxrwxr-x 3 swdsadm cisco 4096 Dec 20 2000 accessProEC
drwxrwxr-x 3 swdsadm cisco 4096 Dec 20 2000 accessProRC
drwxrwxr-x 2 swdsadm cisco 4096 Aug 13 2008 ace
--- SNIP ---
drwxrwxr-x 3 swdsadm cisco 4096 Oct 27 2006 wsc6009
drwxrwxr-x 2 swdsadm cisco 4096 Oct 27 2006 wsc6503
drwxrwxr-x 2 swdsadm cisco 4096 Oct 27 2006 wsc6504
drwxrwxr-x 3 swdsadm cisco 4096 Oct 27 2006 wsc6506
drwxrwxr-x 3 swdsadm cisco 4096 Oct 27 2006 wsc6509
drwxrwxr-x 2 swdsadm cisco 4096 Oct 27 2006 wsc6513
drwxrwxr-x 2 swdsadm cisco 4096 Dec 20 2000 wsc8510csr
drwxrwxr-x 2 swdsadm cisco 4096 Apr 11 2001 wsc8510msr
drwxrwxr-x 2 swdsadm cisco 4096 Dec 20 2000 wsc8540csr
drwxrwxr-x 2 swdsadm cisco 4096 Apr 11 2001 wsc8540msr
drwxrwxr-x 2 swdsadm cisco 4096 Jan 9 2008 xr12000
226 Transfer complete.
ftp> cd cat9300
250 CWD command successful.
ftp>
4. Do a directory listing and fetch that HTML file and logout
ftp> ls
227 Entering Passive Mode (72,163,7,54,102,29)
150 Opening ASCII mode data connection for file list
-rw-r--r-- 1 swdsadm cisco 15983 Jan 29 2018 CAT9300.html
226 Transfer complete.
ftp> get CAT9300.html
227 Entering Passive Mode (72,163,7,54,102,32)
150 Opening ASCII mode data connection for CAT9300.html
226 Transfer complete.
16159 bytes received in 0.169 seconds (93.1 kbytes/s)
ftp>
5. Open the HTML file in your favorite browser and voila, you have the supported MIB directory for that network device type
Below are two samples of the supported MIBs for the Cat9300 family and the Nexus 3000 family.
Summary
I have found this method very easy to find which MIBS are supported by any cisco device. It is an easy way to get that comprehensive list of supported MIBs. If you want to download them for your own NMS, you can go to the SNMP Object navigator and download the supported MIBS as next step.