various forms including read only metrics or statistics further the information may be of a type that is not normally supported by an snmp mib with reference to fig3 an example tree architecture of a mib 20 according to one embodiment of the present invention is illustrated in this embodiment assume a mib table entitled performance table resides under the nortel object and has an oid reference of 3 the oid for the mib table entitled performance table is 1 4 6 1 4 1 8 3 an exemplary mib table according to one embodiment of the present invention is illustrated in fig4 each row in the table represents an object maintained by the performance table and the columns represent object instances associated with an object the object instances as illustrated may be an object index a name group data type source and value information for a given object the index simply refers to the oid reference such that an oid may be used to identify the object or corresponding object instance as illustrated an oid reference for the performance table is 3 the four objects entries have oid references of 1 2 3 and 4 and the object instances name group data type source and value have oid references of 1 2 3 4 and 5 respectively thus the oid for x which represents information about the source of object 2 has an oid of 1 4 6 1 4 1 8 3 2 4 in operation the nms 12 does not need to understand the configuration of the performance table 3 instead a.