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

"Agentless" monitoring does not exist

[thesandbender]

"Agentless" monitoring is a misnomer dreamt up by marketing and sales types to differentiate their product as "better". All monitoring is agent based, the only difference is if the agent you are using is bundled with the system or a 3rd party agent. Most "agentless" monitoring systems acquire their data through SNMP, sar, netstat, iostat, WMI, etc. All these providers will consume system resources in some manner or another so the argument that agents incur more overheard is usually nonsense (unless the agent is very poorly written). In most cases the monitoring packages bundled with the system can be disabled so the new agents will consume resources that would have been used by the system utilities. And poorly conceived/written monitoring schemes will be a drag on any system. The only real differentiation is:

a) specific metrics gathered
b) frequency of update
c) "agent" based required distribution and control of a 3rd-party piece of software

Performance and resource utilization are a red herring.