Editing Simple Network Management Protocol (section)

== Management information base ==
{{Main|Management information base}}
SNMP agents expose management data on the managed systems as variables. The protocol also permits active management tasks, such as configuration changes, through remote modification of these variables. The variables accessible via SNMP are organized in hierarchies. SNMP itself does not define which variables a managed system should offer. Rather, SNMP uses an extensible design that allows applications to define their own hierarchies. These hierarchies are described as a [[management information base]] (MIB). MIBs describe the structure of the management data of a device subsystem; they use a [[hierarchical namespace]] containing [[object identifier]]s (OID). Each OID identifies a variable that can be read or set via SNMP. MIBs use the notation defined by [[Structure of Management Information]] Version 2.0 (SMIv2, {{IETF RFC|2578}}), a subset of [[ASN.1]].