PathSolutions sends out one 512 byte packet per network interface every 5 minutes. For example: When monitoring a 48 port switch, we will send 48 packets to collect information and receive 48 responses within a 5 minute polling period. For even bandwidth-constrained networks, this proves to be a very light-weight footprint on the network, yet we collect more information on the network’s health. Less load is added to the network than any other monitoring product due to our packet optimization. Other SNMP monitoring products tend to send out a flurry of packets trying to collect information on the network.
Even if you are running a modern network (100meg and 1gig links), PathSolutions was originally designed to work well on 64k and 128k fractional frame-relay links, so it should work really well in any network environment with more bandwidth than that.
You can use a sniffer on the back-end of PathSolutions server and watch what SNMP packets sent to/from each device. You will see a trickle of packets to each switch/router to collect information to specifically avoid any chance of flooding a low-bandwidth link (one thread per device).
In this sense, we are very different than other products on the market which may flood the network with their collection activities.