HP SIM V5.1 User Guide (356920-009, January 2007)

About default polling tasks
Polling tasks track health status for systems in the associated collections. Hardware Status Polling needs to
occur periodically to determine when systems go offline or hardware degrades. You can customize polling
tasks for specific systems to run at scheduled times. You can also create new polling tasks with different
collections to match your specific requirements.
Data Collection tasks are included with other polling tasks. Data Collection finds more specific system
information, such as asset data.
You can configure the polling tasks to take place based on the receipt of an event. Event Polling Tasks are
associated with event collections. For example, you might set up a Hardware status polling task for when
traps are received from a system.
When a polling task is set up to run as the result of a change in an event collection, the polling task is applied
to all systems generating events that match the given collection.
NOTE: It is not advisable to schedule a polling task based on an event collection periodically. The task
would run on the set of systems for each event in the associated collection.
NOTE: Do not delete or disable default tasks without replacing them with a substitute task that achieves
a similar result. For example, if you remove a hardware status polling task, systems continue to be discovered,
but status on them is not updated. If you remove the Daily Device Identification task, you would no longer
detect any changes in management on systems.
The following default polling tasks are available on the View All Scheduled Tasks page:
• Bi-weekly data collection
• Daily device identification
• Delete events older than 90 days
• Hardware status polling for non servers
• Hardware status polling for servers
• Hardware status polling for systems no longer disabled
• Initial data collection
• Initial hardware status polling
• Software version status polling
• Software version status polling for systems no longer disabled
• Initial contract and warranty collection
• Monthly contract and warranty collection
Bi-weekly data collection
The Bi Weekly Data Collection task runs on all of the systems in the Data Collection List collection. The
default schedule is to run every other Saturday at noon.
Daily device identification
Use the Daily Device Identification task to identify information about systems like networking systems. This
task runs once a day by default and the information is stored in the database. The following information is
identified:
• Determines Single Login and Secure Task Execution (STE) support on a managed system
• Type of management protocol on the system (HTTP, SNMP, DMI, and WBEM)
• Type and subtype of system (server, storage, switch, router, and so on)
• Product name of the system
• Operating system name and version
• Web Agents running on the system
258 Managing with tasks