At the heart of every approach to enterprise management is the need to monitor the IT environment for what is working and what isn’t. Today’s sophisticated monitoring approaches provide data to help IT operations determine whether a component-level problem is impacting key business services and applications. The most effective products efficiently collect performance data without a lot of setup and overhead, to provide a clear picture of the impact a problem is having (or could have) on a network or the entire enterprise. Data collection mechanisms used by enterprise management products for monitoring are categorized as either agent-based or agentless.

This white paper looks at the pros and cons of agent and agentless approaches, and describes Indicative’s unique approach that combines the best of both techniques while limiting the liabilities associated with each.