Designing and Managing Behavior Models - Using Polls -
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Using Polls

NerveCenter polls enable you to retrieve information from SNMP agents on devices in order to determine the status of those devices. The figure below depicts the role that a poll plays in a behavior model.

To function as part of a behavior model, a poll must be tied to one or more alarms by means of one or more triggers. If the poll does not define a trigger that can affect a pending alarm transition, the poll is never sent to a device. This behavior is part of NerveCenter's smart polling feature.

Other aspects of this smart polling feature are that NerveCenter doesn't send a poll to a node unless the poll's property is in the node's property group and that NerveCenter never sends a suppressible poll to a suppressed node. Together, these behaviors sharply curtail the amount of network traffic NerveCenter generates by polling SNMP agents.

The remainder of this chapter explains in detail how to create and work with polls. Refer to the following sections:

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