How does Agentless Monitoring Work in eG Enterprise?

Agentless monitoring is implemented in eG Enterprise using Remote Agents. A remote agent is capable of monitoring a number of systems and applications remotely, i.e., without requiring an agent to be locally installed on the system that is to be monitored.

Figure 1 depicts how a single remote agent interacts with and extracts measures from different servers across platforms.

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Figure 1 : How do remote agents work?

For monitoring Microsoft Windows systems and applications, a remote agent uses Netbios/perfmon to communicate with the operating system/applications. For monitoring Unix systems, secure shell (SSH) is used. In addition, for specific applications, the remote agent uses application-specific protocols to communicate with the application (e.g., SQLNet for Oracle databases, HTTP for WebLogic and WebSphere application servers, JDBC for Sybase, etc.).

As is the case with internal and external agents, the configuration on the eG manager dictates which agent functions as an internal agent, or a remote agent, or an external agent. Since eG Enterprise uses a single agent model, the same agent installation can function as any of the agent types. In fact, the same agent could function both as an external agent and as a remote agent. With the external agent functionality, the agent performs black-box testing (typically, exercising the application being monitored or generating synthetic transactions). When functioning as a remote agent, the agent polls the target server for critical internal metrics ranging from system CPU, memory, disk space to application process execution status.

Currently, remote agents are supported on the following servers:

  • Windows 2012
  • Windows 8
  • Windows 10
  • HPUX
  • AIX
  • Solaris

Note:

Remote agents that monitor VMware vSphere, Citrix XenServer, and Microsoft Hyper-V virtualization platforms can operate on Windows, Linux, or Solaris hosts.

The number of remote agents allowed for a target environment and the number of systems that can be monitored in an agentless manner are controlled by the eG license.

Note:

The following capabilities of eG Enterprise are not available for servers or applications that are managed in an agentless manner:

  • Detailed diagnosis
  • Automatic corrective script execution
  • Remote control actions