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Manage Pollers vs UnDP tool - What is the difference?

Iv'e never been quite sure of the difference between the Manage Pollers tool and the Universal Device Poller tool. How are they different? What is the use case for each? Thanks for any help.

  • The manage pollers menu is for 2 specific use cases, replacing the out of the box values for the cpu/mem pollers or the node details.  Everything else falls under the UNDP tool.

    So if you have a device that is not showing CPU load correctly you can use manage pollers to tell solarwinds to poll a different OID to get cpu info for that hardware.  Likewise if you wanted it to get machinetype from a different OID than the defaults you could build a custom Details poller and point it to a different OID, I often do this for things like Cisco devices that come back with generic names like 39xx series switch, when I know there is an OID that would say specifically which switch type I have,

    UnDP tend to be things that solarwinds doesn't poll for at all out of the box, so maybe like if I was polling a WAN accelerator I would collect metrics on things like effective compression rates,   or if I have a UPS i can track input line voltage.

  • So, in a nutshell, the UnDP tool can do anything that Manage Pollers can do, but Manage Pollers is currently limited to CPU, memory and node details pollers. Is that correct?

    If so, it would seem that the Manage Pollers tool may be the forerunner to moving the UnDP tool to the web.

  • If they could expand/improve on it to the point where it completely replaced the UNDP tool I know and add in a few more features I've been asking for I know I would be happy.  The main perk to using the manage pollers is that it replaces native functions if they aren't working correctly.  If you just set up a UNDP for CPU because your device doesn't report correctly then the default CPU charts would still show the broken values, with manage pollers you are basically over riding the default OID for that metric so it shows up correctly in all the places you expect the cpu metric. 

  • Good point on the Manage Pollers tool being a replacement rather than just an additional OID to be polled. Thanks for the information.