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