Telemetry and AIOps: streaming telemetry vs polling, baselines and event correlation

Monitoring tells you what a network is doing. The traditional method is polling: a monitoring system such as an SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) manager asks each device for values at an interval, often every few minutes. Polling is simple and universal, but it has limits. Anything that happens between polls is averaged away or missed entirely, such as a 20-second traffic burst. Increasing the polling frequency across thousands of devices adds load on both the collector and the devices, because each request must be received, processed and answered.