Designing and Managing Behavior Models - Understanding NerveCenter - How NerveCenter Manages Nodes - Detecting Conditions -
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Detecting Conditions

As is discussed in the section Role in Network Management Strategy, NerveCenter can collect network and system data from a variety of sources. However, most frequently NerveCenter obtains data from Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) agents running on managed nodes. This means that NerveCenter detects most conditions by:

• Receiving and interpreting an SNMP trap
• Polling an SNMP agent for data and analyzing that data

One of the criticisms of SNMP-based enterprise management platforms over the years has been that, because SNMP trap delivery is unreliable, the platform must poll agents and this polling generates too much network traffic. NerveCenter helps alleviate this problem by enabling you to determine the interval at which a poll is sent and to turn a poll off. Even more important is NerveCenter's smart polling feature. NerveCenter sends a poll to a node only if the poll:

• Is part of a behavior model designed to manage that node
• Can cause a change in the alarm's state.

Also, because of NerveCenter's client/server architecture, NerveCenter servers can be distributed so that all polling is done on LANs, and not across a WAN.