If the NIC maintains its connection status, the agent uses MII to determine the status of the resource.
If the NIC does not maintain its connection status, the agent verifies that the NIC is configured and sends a ping to all the hosts listed in the NetworkHosts attribute. If the ping test is successful, it marks the NIC resource online.
If the NetworkHosts list is empty, or the ping test fails, the agent counts the number of packets received by the NIC and compares the count with a previously stored value. If the packet count increases, the resource is marked online. If the count remains unchanged, the agent sends a ping to the broadcast address of the device to generate traffic on the network.
The agent counts the number of packets received by the NIC before and after the broadcast. If the count increases, the resource is marked online. If the count remains the same or decreases over a period of five broadcast cycles, the resource is marked offline.