Out of the box, Orion NPM allows you to monitor just about every SNMP-enabled device on your network. However, there may be cases where the default views and monitors that Orion NPM displays for your monitored device are not sufficient. For example, you may be more interested in the battery life remaining in a UPS battery backup instead of its interface throughput. Another example would be you want to view a list of virtual interfaces on a F5 BIG-IP node. This is where Universal Device Pollers come into play.
Universal Device Pollers allow you to create custom monitors for almost any statistic provided by SNMP based on the device's MIB and OID that is outside of the standard monitoring parameters. Management Information Base (MIB) is a hierarchical database of Object Identifiers (OIDs). SolarWinds Orion NPM has its own MIB database that is regularly updated and contains OIDs for thousands of makes and models of network devices.