Patent ID: 7779026

Claim:
A network monitoring appliance for monitoring a remote network device, the network monitoring appliance comprising: at least one device definition file residing on the network monitoring appliance and comprising query instructions and conversion instructions, the query instructions and conversion instructions being associated with the remote network device, the query instructions including at least one instruction for accessing supplemental data in the at least one device definition file, the supplemental data including at least one description for display in a user interface, the at least one description being associated with at least one object identification of the remote network device, the conversion instructions including at least one scaling factor for converting a unit of measure of response data; a simple network management protocol enabled communications interface configured to: access the remote network device using the query instructions; receive the response data from the remote network device; manipulate the response data using the conversion instructions; and add at least a portion of the supplemental data including the at least one description to the response data; and a data access interface configured to provide external access to the response data.