ENTITY-STATE-TC

Description: ENTITY-STATE-TC module

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ENTITY-STATE-TC is an IETF standards-track MIB (the Entity State MIB, RFC 4268) that defines a set of textual conventions for representing the administrative, operational, standby, and alarm state of physical entities described by ENTITY-MIB. It does not define its own instance data or tables; instead it supplies reusable enumerated types (administrative state, operational state, usage state, alarm state, and standby state) that other MIBs reference when describing the state of hardware components. Its role in monitoring is foundational rather than direct: any MIB that imports these textual conventions uses them to report hardware status such as whether a card/module/port is enabled and functioning correctly, in a degraded/testing state, or in a redundant standby role, and whether it has an active alarm condition. As a textual-conventions module it explicitly depends on and is meant to be imported alongside ENTITY-MIB (RFC 4133), which defines the physical entity table these states apply to. It is used across essentially any vendor or standards-based network device (routers, switches, chassis systems) that implements ENTITY-MIB-based physical inventory with standardized state reporting. Engineers implementing or auditing this functionality typically reference the ENTITY-STATE-TC RFC/standard documentation for the authoritative specification.

A vendor MIB describing a chassis card would import the AdministrativeState, OperationalState, and AlarmState textual conventions from ENTITY-STATE-TC to type its own status objects (e.g., a cardOperStatus object), rather than defining custom enumerations. A monitoring system polling such an object would see standardized values like "enabled"/"disabled" for administrative state or "busy"/"idle" for usage state, letting it apply the same alarm logic across many different vendors' equipment. Because this module defines only types and no instance data, there is nothing to poll directly on ENTITY-STATE-TC itself -- its impact is seen in the consistent semantics of state objects in the MIBs that use it.

Defines textual conventions for representing entity states including administrative, operational, usage, alarm, and standby states of physical entities; used by ENTITY-MIB extensions.