For conformance purposes, it is useful to define a collection of related managed objects. The OBJECT-GROUP macro is used to define each such collection of related objects. It should be noted that the expansion of the OBJECT-GROUP macro is something which conceptually happens during implementation and not during run-time.
To "implement" an object, a SNMPv2 entity acting in an agent role must return a reasonably accurate value for management protocol retrieval operations; similarly, if the object is writable, then in response to a management protocol set operation, a SNMPv2 entity must accordingly be able to reasonably influence the underlying managed entity. If a SNMPv2 entity acting in an agent role can not implement an object, the management protocol provides for the SNMPv2 entity to return an exception or error, e.g, noSuchObject [4]. Under no circumstances shall a SNMPv2 entity return a value for objects which it does not implement -- it must always return the appropriate exception or error, as described in the protocol specification [4].