| Description | A capabilities entry holds an OID indicating support for a
particular capability. Capabilities may include hardware and
software functions and the implementation of MIB
Modules. The semantics of the OID are defined in the
description of pmCapabilitiesType.
Entries appear in this table if any element in the system has
a specific capability. A capability should appear in this
table only once, regardless of the number of elements in the
system with that capability. An entry is removed from this
table when the last element in the system that has the
capability is removed. In some cases, capabilities are
dynamic and exist only in software. This table should have an
entry for the capability even if there are no current
instances. Examples include systems with database or WEB
services. While the system has the ability to create new
databases or WEB services, the entry should exist. In these
cases, the ability to create these services could come from
other processes that are running in the system, even though
there are no currently open databases or WEB servers running.
Capabilities may include the implementation of MIB Modules
but need not be limited to those that represent MIB Modules
with one or more configurable objects. It may also be
valuable to include entries for capabilities that do not
include configuration objects, as that information, in
combination with other entries in this table, might be used
by the management software to determine whether to
install a policy.
Vendor software may also add entries in this table to express
capabilities from their private branch.
Note that some values of this table's index may result in an
instance name that exceeds a length of 128 sub-identifiers,
which exceeds the maximum for the SNMP
protocol. Implementations should take care to avoid such
values. |