Creating Custom Menu Items

While the standard NNM menus provide useful information, local requirements often require additional menus to provide access to specialized information. For this reason the MIB Application Builder facility is provided. Three kinds of MIB applications can be constructed entirely by using it.

The form MIB application simply retrieves the user-specified MIB values from the selected device and displays them in a simple labeled form. The MIB values can be completely unrelated and come from different parts of the MIB and even from different MIBs.

The table MIB application is intended to query an object with multiple instances. For example, you can specify the MTU, interface speed, and input octets MIB values and the table MIB application will query every interface instance of the selected device. The results are displayed in a tabular format. Information in a table must belong to the same MIB group, such as the interface table.

The graph MIB application isn’t meant for displaying configuration information as are the form and table applications. A numeric MIB value must be the result, and the application polls and graphs (using xnmgraph) the data at a configurable time interval which defaults to 10 seconds.

MIB applications can be placed anywhere in the menu structure, but the Configuration Tools menu is the logical choice for interface data. The application can also be assigned to appear on a right-mouse-click by editing its application registration file (ARF). The ARF should be located beneath the directory that $OV_REGISTRATION/C points to, or to the directory defined by the $OVwRegDir environment variable.