HP TopTools - Manual (Page 52)

toptools user guide
Polling
When checking network resource ‘health’, it is important to consider and understand the difference between
monitoring utilization (such as provided by Resource Monitoring, System Performance Advisor, or Traffic
Monitor), receiving alerts sent from devices, and ‘polling’.
Polling is a schedule of network ‘pings’ sent to a device to determine if the polling system (the Toptools server) can
connect with the target system through the network. If the device fails to respond, it may indicate a network
problem between the Toptools server and the device, a problem with the device’s networking configuration, or that
the device is down. Polling is generally used as a quick indicator to determine if the device is ‘up’ (on the network)
or ‘down’ (disconnected from the network).
Whenever a device fails to respond to a poll, Toptools logs an alert for that device which is then displayed in the
Alert Log. The polling status icon for that device within the Device Selector will change to a yellow Warning
symbol ( ).
The Device Communication dialog provides controls to select the networks or devices to poll and the frequency of
polling. In addition, you may specify the management URL (management home page) for devices in Toptools.
- NOTE -
If Toptools discovers a different management URL for the device, your entry will be overwritten.
A management URL may be the address and port of the webagent on the device, or the URL for another web-based
management application that manages the device.
To access the Device Communication dialog, click the Settings button in the Navigation Panel and select Device
Communication. The settings for retries and timeout are used by Toptools for all device communications (DMI,
SNMP, WMI, etc.).
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