Mibble MIB Browser available

For years, I have been looking for a good tool that I can use myself and recommend for viewing and parsing SNMP MIBs, and for making SNMP queries on devices. There are lots of them out there, but I wanted one that was simple, correct, would run cross-platform so that all Dartware customers could take advantage of the tool, and of course, inexpensive.

Mibble (http://mibble.org) has been evolving over the years. Its author, Per Cederberg has created a Java tool that not only browses MIBs, but also has many other facilities for handling MIB files. Dartware recently took a bit of time to add a few usability features, and now the tool is a very good MIB browsing tool.

Why is Mibble Good?

1. It's simple. It offers the traditional three-pane view. On the left is a list of MIBs, and the tree of SNMP variables within the MIB. The top-right pane shows the MIB's text, or the definition of the selected variable. At the bottom-right is the "results pane" that shows the values returned from a SNMP query.
2. It's correct. Mibble has careful MIB parsing capabilities, and alerts you to errors in a MIB file. On the other hand, it's fairly lenient and will let you use virtually all MIBs.
3. It's cross-platform. It only needs Java 1.5 to work on Windows, MacOS X, Linux and Unix.
4. It's FREE! As a GPL'd program, you can download and use it at no cost.

Give Mibble a try. Read the Tech Note that describes it, or just download it from Dartware's site at: http://download.dartware.com/thirdparty/mibble-2.9.3-dartware.zip

NB: This blog entry was reposted here from a January entry on the InterMapper site.