Concepts for State Polling

This section provides a brief overview of network monitoring, including the order that the State Poller uses to evaluate polling groups. After reading the information in this section, continue to Plan State Polling for more specific information.

As with network discovery, you should focus network monitoring on the critical or most important devices in the network. NNMi can only poll devices in the topology database. You control which network devices NNMi monitors, the type of polling to use, and the interval at which to poll.

You can use the interface and node settings on the Monitoring Configuration form to refine the status polling of devices, and to set different polling types and intervals for different classes, types of interfaces, and types of nodes.

You can configure State Poller data collection to be based on an ICMP (ping) response, or to be based on SNMP data. NNMi automatically handles the mapping from the type of data collection you enable to the actual MIB objects internally, significantly simplifying configuration.

As you plan polling configuration, you should carefully consider how to set up interface groups and node groups for the State Poller service. If you are new to the concept of groups, see Node Groups and Interface Groups, and Node Interface and Address Hierarchy for overview information.

Order of evaluation

Because an interface or node might qualify for multiple groups, the State Poller applies the configured polling interval and polling type in a well-defined order of evaluation. For each object in the discovered topology:

1. If the object is an interface, State Poller looks for a qualifying interface group. Groups are evaluated from the lowest Order Number to the highest. The first matching group is used and evaluation stops.
2. If no interface group has captured the object, node groups are evaluated from lowest Order Number to highest. The first matching group is used and evaluation stops. Any contained interface which has not qualified for an interface group on its own characteristics inherits the polling settings from its hosting node.
3. For devices that are discovered but not included in any node or interface settings definitions, the global monitoring settings (on the Default Settings tab of the Monitoring Configuration form) establish the monitoring behavior.