Descriptive list of MIBs / OIDs for HP & Aruba Networking (Switches and Wireless)

I have a few answers, depending on what you are looking for. And I apologize in advance if any of this reads as patronizing. I just want to make sure I'm providing a complete answer (both to you and to future generations who may see this after the robot apocalypse.)

Answer 1: Googling around
First, the vendor itself publishes their MIB with descriptions for each device type. For example:
http://community.arubanetworks.com/aruba/attachments/aruba/IAP/1529/1/Aruba%20Instant%206.2.0.0-3.2%20MIB%20Reference%20Guide.pdf
and
http://community.arubanetworks.com/aruba/attachments/aruba/unified-wired-wireless-access/7568/1/ArubaOS_5%200MG.pdf

These are fairly comprehensive documents that list out each OID along with what it does and what variables (varbinds) it uses.

But they are device-specific. You aren't going to find an "omnibus" document from the vendor listing all possible OIDS for all their devices because a switch vs a stand-alone AP vs a WLC all behave very differently.

Another thing to note is that device-specific vendor docs will ONLY list the OIDS specific to the device. So all the higher level OIDS (sysname, for example), which are common to a greater or lesser degree, will not be listed there but WILL work.

Answer 2: SNMPTranslate
A second choice, which requires a separate system, is to use the open-source "snmptranslate" command which is part of the Linux net-snmp package. While greater minds than mine have described this is exacting (and loving) detail, the upshot is:
1) you find all the MIBS you want to know about and stick them in a directory
2) you run the "snmptranslate" command against that directory and it expands the numeric data out to textual versions, like this (copy/pasted from here: http://net-snmp.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/TUT:snmptranslate) :
  % snmptranslate -On -Td SNMPv2-MIB::sysUpTime
  .1.3.6.1.2.1.1.3
  sysUpTime OBJECT-TYPE
    -- FROM       SNMPv2-MIB, RFC1213-MIB
    SYNTAX        TimeTicks
    MAX-ACCESS    read-only
    STATUS        current
    DESCRIPTION   "The time (in hundredths of a second) since the network
              management portion of the system was last re-initialized."
  ::= { iso(1) org(3) dod(6) internet(1) mgmt(2) mib-2(1) system(1) 3 }

Of course, you have to HAVE the MIBS in the first place. So typically you'll do a MIBWalk on a device first to get the OIDS which respond, then look up the major branch numbers for which MIB that is, then use a site like oidview.com to pull down that MIB.

Answer 3: self-serving plug for my employer
We at SolarWinds have done the heavy lifting for you. Within the Solarwinds NPM and Engineer's Toolkit tools, there is a utility called the Universal Device Poller (UnDP). This has a combined MIB from all current known vendors (ok, "all" is a stretch, but not by much). The UnDP utility lets you find a particular OID by name, number, or keyword and then test to see if it works against a particular device. You can also walk the entire MIB tree (from .1 all the way down the rabbit hole) and see what else might respond.

What's more, with a solution like NPM, you don't have to do ANYTHING (mostly). You point the monitoring solution at the device's IP and it detects what type of device it is and which OIDS are applicable. Which is kind of the point when you are shelling out $$$ for a monitoring solution. Why pay for the privilege of configuring things yourself? (I say this as someone with 30 yrs experience in IT and 20 focusing on monitoring specifically; and having extensively used Tivoli, Openview, Patrol, and Nagios in large environments.)

Completely Un-necessary Summary
Ultimately, finding the OIDS to which your devices will respond is not a 5 minute task. It will take some dedicated time to suss out. Once you've done it, the likelihood of those OIDS changing - while not zero - is minimal and usually only applies to new versions of the device (ie: unless you buy a slew of new boxes of the same model from the vendor, AND the vendor has changed their OID assignments, you aren't likely to notice. And once again, this happens VERY rarely.). So once the work is done, it's done. And you only need to do it once per device type/model. While your infrastructure may be very large (thousands of devices) chances are you still only have a handful (or two) of actual device models.

Hope that helps.

 - Leon Adato