Agent or Agentless?
That is the Question


Two Companies... Two Approaches

For companies that need a quick return on investment – and effort – agentless monitoring can do the job effectively and affordably, without requiring installation of software on each system to be monitored. And, thanks to the maturation of underlying collection technologies such as WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation) and JMX (Java Management Extensions), agentless monitoring can now deliver a level of depth and breadth unheard of just a few years ago.

Anthony Castaldo, IT Manager at Boston Sand & Gravel Company, utilizes Heroix’s Longitude® agentless software.

“We particularly like the product’s ease of implementation and use, and we were totally impressed by the dashboard and its drill-down capability. Longitude’s Web UI provides us rich monitoring and reporting with remarkable ease and usability. Longitude helps us stay ahead of problems and allows us to make smarter IT purchases and better business decisions,” he says.

Nevertheless, there is still a place for agent-based monitoring, in situations requiring a high level of application-specific customization, corrective actions, or a distributed monitoring architecture. Tembec, Inc., a forest products manufacturing company in Montreal, utilizes Heroix Corp.'s agent-based Heroix eQ Management Suite. 

“For us, the agent is important,” says Steven Lee, senior consultant, who notes that Tembec required the ability to customize monitoring for Oracle and Citrix-based applications, as well as those running on legacy OpenVMS systems.

Benefits in Both 

Here are three key benefits for both agentless and agent-based monitoring tools that can aid in your evaluation process:

Agentless Monitoring

1. Reduces cost and deployment time; some installations can be operational in less than an hour

2. Easier to comply with security policies that may prevent or discourage installation of monitoring software on production systems

3. Increases reliability and reduces ongoing maintenance efforts, as software is installed only on one system instead of many different systems with different operating environments

Agent-based Monitoring

1. Provides the ability for highly customized monitoring and management

2. Facilitates automated correction in situations where that is warranted and desired

3. Continues to monitor in the event that connectivity is lost

So, agent or agentless? The choice depends not only on technical factors, but key business requirements as well. The good news is there are more options, sophistication and flexibility in today’s systems monitoring and management tools than ever before.