I know that SolarWinds has documents that support distributed polling; however, I have found those models to have significant limitations. Using a NAT box takes away the ability to use WMI which is where most of the goodies are when it comes to Windows. Using an additional poller is cost prohibitive when you have several remote sites with only a few nodes in each.
The obvious way to solve this would be with some type of Agent software. The idea I had was to create a Micro Poller, basically a very scaled down version of an additional polling engine that you install on a node and the only node it polls is "localhost" and then communicates back on one or just a small number of ports that would work through NAT (maybe the information service) to the master system or other full additional polling engine. This is just one idea; the ultimate goal of this request is to have SolarWinds support a more full featured distributed polling architecture.
I would love to hear thoughts or suggestions from others on this!