User's Manual

296 CHAPTER 7: MONITORING THE NETWORK
Controlling
Monitoring Type and
Polling Rates
Depending upon the topology and geographical distribution of your
network, regular polling of some segments of your network may cause
more network traffic than is desirable.In order to address this, 3Com
Network Director allows you to control the amount of traffic generated
on your network by the monitors.There is a three level hierarchy in this
mechanism:
■ Whole Map: The Monitoring tab in the Tools > Options dialog box
allows you to control the traffic generated by monitoring for the
whole map.Unless you explicitly override the settings at the subnet or
device level, devices will use the settings you specify here.
■ Subnet: The Monitoring tab in the Properties dialog box for a subnet
allows you to override the whole map settings for a particular subnet
and so control the traffic generated by the monitoring of devices
within that subnet.Unless you explicitly override the settings at the
device level, devices within the subnet will use the settings you specify
here.
■ Device: The Monitoring tab in the Properties dialog box for a device
allows you to override the whole map and, if applicable, subnet
settings for a particular device, and so control the traffic generated by
the monitoring of that device.
Unless explicitly overridden at the device level, devices that appear in
more than one subnet, such as routers and layer-3 switches, inherit the
whole map settings directly rather than inheriting them from one of their
subnets.
The mechanism allows you to control two sets of parameters at each
level: the monitoring mode and the monitor poll rate.
Monitoring Mode
There are various ways in which 3Com Network Director can monitor
your network, each of which generates a different amount of network
traffic.By selecting different monitoring modes you can control the
amount of generated traffic.There are four basic monitoring modes that
are supported:
Full Monitoring: When a device is monitored using full monitoring
mode all of the monitors for the device are enabled.This monitoring
mode provides the most monitoring information for a device and allows
you to monitor links using that device, but generates the most traffic.