Polling Checklist

You can use the checklist below to plan for State Poller configuration.

• What do I want NNMi to monitor?
• What are the logical groups for monitored items, based on object type, location, relative importance, or other criteria?
• How often should NNMi monitor each grouping?

• What data should be collected to capture information about the monitored item? This might include:

  • ICMP (ping) response
  • SNMP fault data
  • SNMP performance data if you have a license for one or more NNM Performance iSPIs

  • Additional SNMP Component Health data

    Note If Web Agents are configured (in addition to SNMP Agents), NNMi can use additional protocols (for example, SOAP protocol for VMware environments).

• What SNMP traps from my network devices should I send to NNMi?

Example polling configuration

To help you understand the polling configuration process, consider this example. Suppose that your network contains the latest proxy servers from ProximiT. You must ensure that these devices can be reached, but you do not require SNMP monitoring of the proxy servers.

1. What can NNMi monitor?

   Because you can only monitor what has been discovered, you configure auto-discovery rules to ensure that NNMi’s database contains your ProximiT proxy servers. For more information on configuring discovery, see NNMi Discovery.

2. What are the logical groups for monitored items?

   It makes sense to group the ProximiT proxy servers together and apply the same monitoring settings to all of them. Because you are not doing interface (SNMP) monitoring for the devices, you do not need any interface groups.

   You can also use this node group to filter views, to check the status of the proxy servers as a group, and to put the group out of service to update firmware.

3. How often should NNMi monitor each group?

   For your service level agreements, a five minute polling interval for the proxy servers is sufficient.

4. What data should be collected?

   Here’s where the monitoring configuration differs from other groups. For our ProximiT proxy server example, you enable ICMP fault monitoring and disable SNMP fault and polling monitoring. Without SNMP fault monitoring for the group, Component Health monitoring does not apply.

3. What SNMP traps should be sent from my network devices to NNMi?

   NNMi uses some SNMP traps to poll a devices as the traps are received without waiting for the next polling interval.

For more detailed planning information concerning these configuration choices, see the following topics:

• What Can NNMi Monitor?
• Planning Groups
• Planning Polling Intervals
• Deciding What Data to Collect
• Deciding What SNMP Traps to Send to NNMi