More Monitoring with Fewer Agents

For over a decade, network monitoring has been done using SNMP-based polling of network devices from a central management station. On the other hand, for server and application monitoring, monitoring solutions have relied on software agents locally installed on the servers. As operating systems and applications have evolved, enhanced monitoring capabilities are now built into these infrastructure components. Using these built-in monitoring capabilities, it is now possible to monitor servers and applications in an IT infrastructure in an "agentless" manner. With this approach, a monitoring solution can have a central data collector that remotely connects to a server and monitors the availability, performance, and usage of a server and the applications that it hosts.

The eG Agentless Monitoring Solution

The eG Agentless Monitoring Solution involves deployment of a central data collector that has access to all the systems that need to be managed in an agentless manner. Since there is no single standard protocol for monitoring server operating systems and applications, eG Enterprise's agentless monitoring solution collects performance statistics on different server operating systems in different ways: SNMP for Novell Netware, OS/400, etc., Secure Shell (ssh) for Unix flavors (Solaris, Linux, AIX, HPUX), and WMI/Perfmon for Microsoft Windows operating systems. Different protocols and mechanisms are used for monitoring applications as well - eg., WMI/Perfmon for Microsoft applications, JMX/HTTP for the WebLogic application, SNMP for Lotus Notes, SQLNet for Oracle databases, etc.

The eG agentless monitoring architecture

Applications Monitored in an Agentless Manner

Application Type	Application
Web Servers	IIS
Databases	Oracle, Microsoft SQL, Sybase, Informix, MySQL
Application Servers	WebLogic, WebSphere, Coldfusion
Mail Servers	Exchange server, Lotus Notes
Microsoft Applications	Domain Controller, Active Directory, File and Print Servers, DHCP servers
Messaging Servers	IBM MQ
Terminal Servers	Citrix, Microsoft Terminal server
Operating Systems	Solaris, AIX, HPUX, Linux, OS/400, Novell Netware, Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows 2003, Windows XP

Agentless vs. Agent-based Monitoring Tradeoffs

There are interesting tradeoffs between the agentless monitoring and the agent-based monitoring approaches.

	Agentless Monitoring	Agent-based Monitoring
Ease of deployment	Easier to deploy because software installation is required only on the remote data collection system.	Agents need to be deployed on all the target servers in the infrastructure. Once deployed, the eG agents require no direct maintenance as they can be auto-upgraded from the central management console.
Security	The remote data collector must be allowed to communicate with the target system on different ports. The data collector may also need to be installed with domain administration privileges to be able to access the remote systems.	Much more secure than the agentless model. The agent to application / OS communications are handled internal to the server. Hence, no additional firewall rules need to be configured to allow monitoring.
Overheads	This approach introduces additional network traffic as the raw performance data is transported to a remote data collector for analysis.	The agent installed on a server collects data locally and only the processed final results are transported to the console. Hence, this approach results in lower network traffic and processing overheads.
Breadth & Depth of monitoring	Not all applications and operating systems have built-in monitoring capabilities and hence the coverage of the agentless approach is less than that of the agent-based approach. Moreover, the depth of the diagnostic information obtainable from the agentless approach is limited.	The agent-based approach provides deeper, broader monitoring. Some of the capabilities available in the eG agent-based solution only include the detailed diagnosis capability (eg., if the CPU usage is 100% which process is consuming CPU?), the eG web adapter for web transaction monitoring, and the eG remote control action capability for initiating corrective actions when abnormal situations are detected.

The agentless solution is ideal for small enterprises where security or the network traffic involved in the monitoring are not key criteria in deciding a monitoring approach. For more critical, complex environments where in-depth monitoring, root-cause diagnosis, and problem resolution are key, the agent-based approach is more appropriate. The automatic capability of the eG agents ensures that the eG agent-based monitoring solution requires near zero maintenance, similar to an agentless solution.

Advantages of the eG Agentless Monitoring Solution

Easy of deployment
A single data collection point is sufficient to monitor tens of servers in the target infrastructure.

Low maintenance
Since there is a single data collection point, day-to-day maintenance of the monitoring solution is handled with less effort.

Complete flexibility
Administrators can choose which of the servers and applications have to be monitored in an agentless manner and which ones require agents.

Tight integration
Seamless correlation of performance statistics from agent-based and agentless monitoring.

For more information:
info@eginnovations.com	http://www.eginnovations.com