Say I change the Probe Interval to 1 minute in the master settings of the dude server. Will the distributed poolers (agents) pool every minute or will they continue to pool with the default 30 seconds interval?

Also, do services inherit the agent from the device settings?
To explain: If I create a new device and set an agent which is not the default agent, the services monitored on that device are probed with the default agent. At least that's what it says in the service settings. But, from the results/graphs I think that they are being pooled by the agent which is selected in the device settings. So I am a bit confused

We have a Dude system with multiple agents distributed through various network segments. My experience is that there is inheritance of settings. The service inherits settings from the device, the device inherits settings from the map it is on and the map inherits settings from the global settings.

So you can have device being polled by a certain agent but if you change the settings of one service to be polled by a different agent it only applies to that service. I have not done this, just seems a logical extension of what I have done with notifications. We have just applied different agents at the device level and let it inherit to all of the services on that device.

With Notifications I have set a global notification and it has inherited to every service on every device. Then I have set a different notification on certain devices and that change breaks the inheritance and applies to all services on that device. I have also applied notifications to individual services on a device and it breaks the inheritance and applies new settings to that service only.

I can only assume that this system applies to the polling settings as well.

I use the exact same setup, change agent on device and not touch the agents on the services for that device. But if you go to config of one of the services, you will see that it shows the default agent (inherited from global settings i guess) and not the agent which i have chosen for the device.
So I wondered and asked

As for notifications, I do the same. Basically I want the same notifications for everything, but I don't want e-mail notifications for every service on a device, so I just change one of the services to include e-mail notification as well.

As for the probe interval, I was thinking that in the case of different agents, the probe interval of the dude server reflect how often the data is pooled from the distributed agents. By this logic, I would have to go to the dude installation which i use as an agent only and set the pooling interval there.
Would be nice if someone could give an authoritative answer to this!?

My assumption, which seems to be correct, based on experimentation - is that "default" means that the standard inheritance applies. So any settings that you specify explicitly on a service will over-ride the inherited setting from the device. If you explicitly configure a setting on a device it will over-ride the inherited setting from the map or global setting and it will also be passed on through inheritance to any services associated with that device.

I know this to be true for the polling agent setting and for notifications, I can only assume that this is a consistent approach for other settings right across the application.

It would be good to have some authoritative information on this, and other details about the workings of The Dude. This forum seems to be the best place to get this sort of information.