Agent or agentless monitoring? It's your choice

NETWORK WORLD NEWSLETTER: AUDREY RASMUSSEN ON NETWORK/SYSTEMS
MANAGEMENT
06/08/05
Today's focus: Agent or agentless monitoring? It's your choice

Dear networking.world@gmail.com,

In this issue:

* The pros and cons of agent and agentless system mgmt.
  monitoring
* Links related to Network/Systems Management
* Featured reader resource
_______________________________________________________________
This newsletter is sponsored by Coradiant
Spin-free Look at the Impact of Real-user Monitoring on Web
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Quick-read 12-page whitepaper provides a detailed look at the
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Today's focus: Agent or agentless monitoring? It's your choice

By Audrey Rasmussen

An interesting trend is happening in system management: the
coming together of agent and agentless monitoring. In the past,
these two approaches were typically an either or kind of choice
where customers had to choose philosophically through their
product choices (typically an all or nothing choice), or
physically - using agent-based monitoring on their more critical
servers and agentless monitoring on servers that weren't as
business sensitive. Interestingly, some management vendors are
responding by giving customers a choice of both approaches.

Agent-based monitoring and management have been the bread and
butter of management for many years. Its management
functionality justified the time and effort it took to deploy
and maintain the agent infrastructure. Then a few years ago,
ITers started complaining about the extra work that is required
to use agents, including the need to deploy multiple agents to
one device because different management tools each have their
own agent.

Some management vendors started offering agentless monitoring
solutions as an alternative to their agent technologies, with
some manufacturers offering only agentless technologies. Some of
these offerings, although called agentless, actually used native
agents of devices for monitoring or gathering management data.
Other products gathered information through standards such as
WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation, Microsoft's
implementation of Common Information Model), which obviated the
need for agents.

Several management vendors have told EMA that their customers
were asking for a quick discovery method that could first tell
them what was out there. Once they had that information, the
customers could decide where to deploy agents. In response,
several system management vendors added IP-based discovery to
their repertoire in order to find the devices that are on the
network. So now customers have a choice - using agentless or
agent-based, or both.

An example of this trend is BMC's Performance Manager, which now
includes both agentless and agent-based technologies, giving
customers a choice. And there are examples of this trend in
other management products, such as Mercury Interactive's
SiteScope, which offers agentless monitoring capabilities.

Agentless typically provides lightweight monitoring, with
limited depth of data gathering or monitoring capabilities. In
addition, without code or management intelligence installed on
the system, the opportunities for management are little to none.
The advantage is the ease of deployment - there is no need to
deploy the agents - as well as the ease of maintenance. Despite
its limitations, if the agentless monitoring provides all that
you need for a specific device, then it is probably the right
choice for you.

The agent-based approach requires deployment and maintenance of
the agents on the managed systems. Some agent approaches use
remote management, so an agent is not necessary on every managed
device, which reduces the number of agents that need to be
managed. On the other hand, the agent-based approaches can
gather more management data and more depth of information
because of the agent instrumentation that is sitting on the
system.

In addition, the agent-based approaches can deliver management
capabilities through the interaction of the agents and the
management servers. In short, the agent-based products offer
more robust management (including monitoring) capabilities than
the agentless varieties. As a side note, agent-based
technologies can be more expensive than agentless - although I'm
sure that there are exceptions to this.

If you're already using agent-based approaches and are not
satisfied with the time that it takes to manage the agent
infrastructure, or your company will not tolerate the
installation of additional code on systems, you may want to take
a look at some of the agentless technologies that are available
to see if they may be a fit for you.

It's not an all or nothing choice - you can use agentless for
systems that don't need robust management, while using
agent-based products for the systems where robust management
does matter. There may or may not be a cost differential for
mixing the approaches on your systems, as compared to an
all-agent deployment. As the management vendors are starting to
give you a choice - exercise that choice where it makes most
sense.

RELATED EDITORIAL LINKS

Vendors tout vulnerability mgmt. wares
Network World, 06/06/05
http://www.networkworld.com/nlnsm2396

Tech Update: SMI-S 1.1 simplifies storage management
Network World, 06/06/05
http://www.networkworld.com/nlnsm2397
_______________________________________________________________
To contact: Audrey Rasmussen

Audrey Rasmussen is a vice president with Enterprise Management
Associates <http://www.enterprisemanagement.com/> in Boulder,
Colorado, a leading industry analyst firm focusing exclusively
on all aspects of the management of information technology.
Audrey has more than 25 years of experience working with
distributed systems, applications and networks. Her current
focus at EMA is system management, application management and
enterprise management technologies. Reach her at
<mailto:rasmussen@enterprisemanagement.com>.
_______________________________________________________________
This newsletter is sponsored by Coradiant
Spin-free Look at the Impact of Real-user Monitoring on Web
Applications

Quick-read 12-page whitepaper provides a detailed look at the
impact of real-user monitoring on the productivity of web-based
application operations: identify problems quickly, isolate
root-cause faster, decrease support costs, and service
customers better. Download the free whitepaper:
http://www.fattail.com/redir/redirect.asp?CID=105694
_______________________________________________________________
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http://www.networkworld.com/topics/management.html
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