Agent-based or Agent-less Network Monitoring

An anonymous reader writes "ITO has published an interesting article on agent-based and agent-less network monitoring approaches: "Agents can monitor the status (availability and performance) of applications, servers, and network components in significantly more depth than generic management tools, since they are able to gather data through application-specific interfaces, exercise the full application functionality, and perform localised aggregation and summarisation of high volume metrics for example.""

Comments

In a nutshell: speed of alerts vs. footprint

[mildness]

Please know that my perspective is systems monitoring opposed to the mostly NW orientation of the original (very good) article.

The main difference for my company's application is that an agent can tell you immediately of service degradation while an agent-less solution must wait for the next polling interval. As the article mentions, another important consideration is that agents can drill much deeper.

Importantly, agents require less NW overhead but take up more, often cheaper, RAM, disk and CPU resources.

In my current situation, my approach is to deploy agents wherever possible.

Cheers,

Bill

Re:Why the hassle

[m1ndrape]

SNMPv3 is supposed to be more secure, but then again how many products out there really support v3.

The biggest downside, overlooked.

[Onan]

I'd say that the biggest drawback to the whole category of approaches involving cooperative monitoring is that it adds complexity. And of course added complexity increases the chances that a system will fail to behave in the way that you expect, or indeed fail to work at all.

Monitoring systems really should be a couple orders of magnitude more reliable than the things which they monitor. One of the most effective ways to ensure that is by having them be far clearer and simpler; an advantage that cooperative monitoring forgoes.