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Polling Devices

My organization is wondering if Solarwinds NPM can poll the devices by mac address instead of IP? We are a Cable/Internet provider with over 6500 cable modems getting thier IPs using DHCP. As the mac address of these modems does not change or would we be better off using a host name? Thanks

Tom Summers

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sean.martinez

We are only able to Poll based on IP Address or Hostname (provided that the Hostname resolves via Reverse DNS to the IP Address).

Nandish

All the devices use SNMP protocol to discover and poll ,except for the ones on ICMP.The polling of each device is going to happen using SNMP MIBs.When devices get added it uses "Sysobjectid" which is unique for each vendor, to discover a device.Only after successful device discovery the polling is going to be initiated.When you have 6500 modems of same vendor or different vendor,it is going to have a unique Node id.

Answering your questions.

NPM does not poll the device information using IP address or MAC address.It uses SNMP MIBs.To differentiate each device its going to have a unique id called Nodeid.

Please let us know if you need more details.Did you happen to download and use NPM evaluation version?