The CounterBasedGauge64 type represents a non-negative
integer, which may increase or decrease, but shall never
exceed a maximum value, nor fall below a minimum value. The
maximum value can not be greater than 2^64-1
(18446744073709551615 decimal), and the minimum value can
not be smaller than 0. The value of a CounterBasedGauge64
has its maximum value whenever the information being modeled
is greater than or equal to its maximum value, and has its
minimum value whenever the information being modeled is
smaller than or equal to its minimum value. If the
information being modeled subsequently decreases below
(increases above) the maximum (minimum) value, the
CounterBasedGauge64 also decreases (increases).
Note that this TC is not strictly supported in SMIv2,
because the 'always increasing' and 'counter wrap' semantics
associated with the Counter64 base type are not preserved.
It is possible that management applications which rely
solely upon the (Counter64) ASN.1 tag to determine object
semantics will mistakenly operate upon objects of this type
as they would for Counter64 objects.
This textual convention represents a limited and short-term
solution, and may be deprecated as a long term solution is
defined and deployed to replace it.
ZeroBasedCounter64
uint64
This TC describes an object which counts events with the
following semantics: objects of this type will be set to
zero(0) on creation and will thereafter count appropriate
events, wrapping back to zero(0) when the value 2^64 is
reached.
Provided that an application discovers the new object within
the minimum time to wrap it can use the initial value as a
delta since it last polled the table of which this object is
part. It is important for a management station to be aware
of this minimum time and the actual time between polls, and
to discard data if the actual time is too long or there is
no defined minimum time.
Typically this TC is used in tables where the INDEX space is
constantly changing and/or the TimeFilter mechanism is in
use.
Note that this textual convention does not retain all the
semantics of the Counter64 base type. Specifically, a
Counter64 has an arbitrary initial value, but objects
defined with this TC are required to start at the value
zero. This behavior is not likely to have any adverse
effects on management applications which are expecting
Counter64 semantics.
This textual convention represents a limited and short-term
solution, and may be deprecated as a long term solution is
defined and deployed to replace it.