Mailbag: Agents and agentless management

NETWORK WORLD NEWSLETTER: AUDREY RASMUSSEN ON NETWORK/SYSTEMS
MANAGEMENT
06/15/05
Today's focus: Mailbag: Agents and agentless management

Dear networking.world@gmail.com,

In this issue:

* Readers weigh in on agent use in management
* Links related to Network/Systems Management
* Featured reader resource
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Today's focus: Mailbag: Agents and agentless management

By Audrey Rasmussen

Last week, I wrote an article on the trend of vendors providing
both agent-based and agentless monitoring and management. I
received feedback from several readers that I thought I'd share
in this week's column.

One reader writes:

"The most important decision between the two choices is
dependent on the server crash... in an agent-based system using
store-and-forward, the root cause is usually captured for
analysis; however, in an agentless system there isn't a
store-and-forward mechanism and the data is lost for root-cause
analysis. To my firm and clients - this is the holy grail...
capturing the data that is needed for root-cause analysis and
not the second-guessing, armchair-quarterbacking, or
finger-pointing that usually occurs after a failure.

"The decision is [also based on] the standardization of the
hardware systems from a vendor - both HP and IBM provide a
robust agent and free agent to monitor the performance layer of
the hardware with some basic monitoring for customer identified
services."

Another reader says:

"One of the main challenges with agents is not really the agents
themselves; it is the networking challenges that make it tough
to deploy them. As you point out, agents typically provide more
in-depth capabilities. One of them is usually the ability to
query the agent on-demand from your management console in order
to get real-time 'right now' data and status information without
remote control.

"To achieve this, the agent requires two-way TCP communications.
This is where the trouble begins. With today's complex networks,
agents now have to wrestle with DHCP (changing IP addresses),
multiple network interfaces in a server (multiple IP
[addresses]), firewall rules (DMZs, etc.), local firewalls and
IDS/IPS software on servers, and lastly, routing issues.
Generally, this is where the server management teams get into
fistfights with the network team.

"So agentless seems like an easier approach. Not necessarily.
The key and important downside to agentless (aside from limited
functionality) is network overhead. This is significant and must
be evaluated. On a high-speed data center LAN, this may not be
much of an issue, but on a distributed WAN, agentless can be a
killer. This is why we (and perhaps others) have developed a
hybrid approach: easily distributed one-way TCP,
super-lightweight agents. These new agents remove the
aforementioned networking issues from the mix and provide
minimal bandwidth utilization, enabling distribution of agents a
reality where it would have been unthinkable before."

Now that you have a choice of management approaches -
agent-based or agentless - I'd like to hear your preferences for
using these approaches and your experiences. Please send me
e-mail (ITers only - no vendors please!). Let me know why or
when you use one vs. the other. If I receive enough responses, I
will write a follow-up article to report the results. Please
send your response to
<mailto:Rasmussen@enterprisemanagement.com> with "AGENTS" in the
subject line.

RELATED EDITORIAL LINKS

Taking on IT service management
Network World, 06/13/05
http://www.networkworld.com/nlnsm2613
_______________________________________________________________
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 Entuity
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Managing today's network with yesterday's tools? Are you sure
your network is running its best? Will it meet future
requirements? Qualify for a FREE network assessment using
Entuity's Eye of the Storm, and get a free 4 GB iPod mini as a
thank you. Click here to apply:
http://www.fattail.com/redir/redirect.asp?CID=106232
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