OLD-CISCO-CPU-MIB

MIB Reference — IPNetwork Monitor

All MIBsOLD-CISCO-CPU-MIB

Category: Legacy Cisco IOS

Description:

Provides legacy Cisco IOS CPU utilization counters superseded by CISCO-PROCESS-MIB in later IOS versions.

Imported Objects

From CISCO-SMI

local

From RFC-1212

OBJECT-TYPE

What Is OLD-CISCO-CPU-MIB?

OLD-CISCO-CPU-MIB is a legacy Cisco private enterprise MIB that provided basic CPU utilization counters for Cisco IOS devices before being superseded by the more comprehensive CISCO-PROCESS-MIB. Its scope is narrow but directly hardware/software-health focused: it reports how busy the router or switch's main processor is, typically as a percentage utilization figure over a defined interval. This makes it a straightforward performance/load monitoring MIB used to detect CPU exhaustion — a common cause of dropped packets, slow console/SSH response, or routing protocol instability on older IOS platforms. It has an explicit dependency relationship with CISCO-PROCESS-MIB, which replaced it and offers richer per-process CPU breakdowns; agents supporting both typically deprecate this module in favor of the newer one. It was deployed on older Cisco IOS routers and switches (pre-dating per-process CPU accounting) for basic CPU load monitoring. Engineers can download the OLD-CISCO-CPU-MIB file directly to load it into their MIB browser.

IPNetwork Monitor allows you to monitor SNMP objects defined in OLD-CISCO-CPU-MIB. Use the built-in SNMP Monitoring Browser to explore available variables, view their current values and descriptions, and select the objects you want to monitor. You can then create SNMP monitors, configure thresholds, and receive alerts when monitored values change.

What Can Be Monitored

  • overall CPU utilization percentage

Supported Devices

  • legacy Cisco IOS routers and switches

Monitoring Examples

No sample objects were provided for this module, but based on its well-documented legacy role, an admin would have polled its overall CPU busy-percentage object to get 5-second/1-minute/5-minute utilization figures, alerting when utilization stayed pegged near 100%. A sustained spike would correlate with symptoms like slow device management access or routing-protocol neighbor flaps due to missed hello packets. Since Cisco later replaced it with CISCO-PROCESS-MIB's per-process CPU table for finer-grained accounting, most modern deployments would prefer that module instead.

OIDs
OID symbolicOID numericTypeAccessDescription
lcpu1.3.6.1.4.1.9.2.1
INT busyPer1.3.6.1.4.1.9.2.1.56INTEGERread-onlyCPU busy percentage in the last 5 second period. Not the last 5 realtime seconds but the last 5 second period in the scheduler.
INT avgBusy11.3.6.1.4.1.9.2.1.57INTEGERread-only1 minute exponentially-decayed moving average of the CPU busy percentage.
INT avgBusy51.3.6.1.4.1.9.2.1.58INTEGERread-only5 minute exponentially-decayed moving average of the CPU busy percentage.
INT idleCount1.3.6.1.4.1.9.2.1.59INTEGERread-writecisco internal variable. not to be used
INT idleWired1.3.6.1.4.1.9.2.1.60INTEGERread-writecisco internal variable. not to be used

RFC description

Vendor-specific legacy Cisco MIB for CPU utilization monitoring in older Cisco devices, provides CPU busy percentages and moving averages.

Start monitoring Legacy Cisco IOS router/switch (CPU utilization, pre-CISCO-PROCESS-MIB) with a free 30-day trial of IPNetwork Monitor. Import MIBs, browse SNMP OIDs, create custom SNMP monitors, configure alerts, and monitor any SNMP-enabled network device from a single console.

Download OLD-CISCO-CPU-MIB