NetIM’s poller provides the ability to contact devices to determine the device status (up or down), and then compute availability (the percent of time that a device has been up) based on the device status. The device status and availability metrics can be applied to any device, not just SNMP-manageable devices.

There may be devices in your network for which you would like to monitor device status and availability but not detailed performance metrics. When this is the case, see Using the Polling wizard to create, clone, edit or delete Polling Profiles to create a polling profile that contains only the Device Status and Availability metrics, and then apply that polling profile to appropriate devices.

When determining device status, the poller attempts to contact the device using SNMP and ICMP Ping. (If NetCollector is running on Linux, the poller uses SNMP and TCP Ping.)

The poller uses several device status samples to compute device availability. The polling frequency defined in your polling profile determines the frequency for polling device status, and then device availability is computed as listed in the following table.