What is the role of the poller in NPM and how does it affect scalability?

• A. Pollers distribute data collection workload across multiple processes or servers; adding pollers increases scalability by parallelizing polling of nodes and interfaces.
• B. Pollers only store collected data; they do not affect scalability.
• C. Pollers determine alert thresholds.
• D. Pollers rotate IP addresses for devices.

Answer: (A)

The poller is the data-collection worker in NPM. Its job is to actively poll network devices (via SNMP, WMI, etc.), gather performance metrics, and process that data before it’s stored in the Orion database. When you have multiple pollers, the workload is distributed across these workers, so devices and interfaces are polled in parallel rather than all by one process.

This parallelization is what drives scalability. As the network grows, a single poller can become a bottleneck, but adding more pollers lets many devices be polled at the same time. That means faster poll cycles, more timely data, and better overall performance under load. Pollers can be deployed on different servers to share the load and improve fault tolerance; if one poller has an issue, others can continue collecting data.

Pollers are not responsible for storing data (that’s the database), they don’t set alert thresholds (that’s handled by alerting rules and thresholds), and they don’t rotate device IPs.