An SNMP Agent Development process inevitably involves testing and debugging activities that are tedious and time consuming. To save time and money on this development phase and to ensure that the developed responder's software is compliant with the SNMP standards, LogiSoft AR Ltd. came up with the SNMP Inquisitor, an easy to use, intuitive and comprehensive application suite that includes:

• MIB Compiler
• SNMP Inquisitor Application
• SNMP Sender Utility

Now the entire agent's testing process is reduced to minutes. This quick testing time does not make any sacrifices in the completeness of the testing procedures. The scrupulous testing does not only include every MIB variable and every SNMP request type but also carefully checks the responses for any deviations from the requests for comments (RFC). It checks returned variable types, value ranges and sizes, mandatory variables that are not implemented and much more.

The correctness of the responses is not the only area of comprehensive testing that is covered by the SNMP Inquisitor. The applications included in the suite make testing of the agent's performance easy and lead to creating of the reliable and efficient software.

Ease of use allows to start comprehensive testing at early development stages and change the software design at early development stage minimizing the total cost of the projects.

The testing features are not the only application of the software package. The advanced debugging features make the application suite very valuable to simplify debugging.

MIB Compiler

The MIB compiler is used to compile MIBs and create a MIB database used by the SNMP Inquisitor for testing and debugging.

SNMP Inquisitor

This testing and debugging application uses the MIB database created by MIB compiler to conduct comprehensive testing of an SNMP responder verifying each result for conformance to the RFCs. It flags even small deviations from the standards displaying the test results in the detailed and comprehensive form. The test configuration and test results can be saved to disk and subsequently loaded. Each test can be easily reproduced and used for debugging. The test results can be exported to an ASCII text file.

Test configuration is simple and intuitive. The configuration is automatically saved upon exiting the application and loaded during subsequent application initialization.

SNMP Sender

This application provides full flexibility of specifying and sending requests to the SNMP responder entity reaching far beyond the capabilities of traditional MIB browsers and is a valuable asset for the agent's debugging and testing.