real-time data, when does polling become a performance killer

hey all, i've been thinking about real-time data updates in our cloud infrastructure. we often use simple polling for things like status checks or small dashboard updates. it's easy to implement, but at what point does the frequency of polling start to impact server load and network traffic? are there clear metrics or thresholds where we should seriously consider moving to WebSockets or other push-based mechanisms instead? curious to hear your experiences and strategies for managing this tradeoff.