An efficient polling layer for SNMP

We propose the introduction of a Polling Layer that allows the efficient instrumentation of the management information models for the use of monitoring-intensive management applications. The polling layer allows to optimize the number of polling packets sent to the SNMP agents to collect management data. We describe the architecture of the polling layer that allows the management applications to specify their exact requirements for polling operations. We show how the knowledge of these requirements, combined with an efficient use of SNMP packets, lead to an important gain in the generated polling packets. This gain gets more important under heavy monitoring load. Finally, we show the advantages of the polling layer over different other approaches and we discuss its tradeoffs.