IBM Tivoli Monitoring > Version 6.3 Fix Pack 2 > Installation Guides > Installation Guide > Pre-deployment phase > Agent deployments

IBM Tivoli Monitoring, Version 6.3 Fix Pack 2

Agentless monitoring versus monitoring agents

IBM Tivoli Monitoring provides operating system (OS) agents that monitor the availability and performance of the computers in your monitoring environment. An example of an OS agent is the monitoring agent for Windows, which can monitor Windows XP, Windows 2003, and Windows 2008 operating systems. These full-function OS agents must reside on the same computers they are monitoring.

IBM Tivoli Monitoring also provides agentless monitors. An agentless monitor is a standard Tivoli Monitoring agent that can monitor the operating system running on multiple remote nodes that do not have the full-function OS agents running on them. An agentless monitor obtains data from nodes it is monitoring via a remote API, in this case, SNMP, CIM, or WMI—running on the node being monitored. Since these interfaces provide information about either operating system functions or base application functions, no IBM Tivoli Monitoring component need be installed or deployed on the monitored node.

API Function
Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) TCP/IP transport protocol for exchanging network management data and controlling the monitoring and operation of network nodes in a TCP/IP environment.
Common Information Model (CIM) XML-based standard for defining device and application characteristics so system administrators and management programs can monitor and control them using the same set of tools, regardless of their differing architectures. CIM provides a more comprehensive toolkit for such management functions than the Simple Network Management Protocol.
Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) Manage devices and applications in a network of Windows-based computers. Provides data about the status of local or remote computer systems as well as the tools for controlling them. Included with Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 and 2008 operating systems.

These APIs are supported by the Agent Builder, which enables you to build custom agentless monitoring solutions that are separate from the agentless monitors available on the Tivoli Monitoring installation media and that provide additional function.

Since an agentless monitor is a standard Tivoli Monitoring agent, it collects data and distributes it to a Tivoli Enterprise Monitoring Server, and then on to a Tivoli Enterprise Portal Server. It also takes advantage of the various features of the IBM Tivoli Monitoring product, such as Tivoli Enterprise Portal workspace views, situations, remote deployment of the agentless monitors, policies, and so on.

Agentless monitoring does not provide the kind of deep-dive information your site may need for its core business servers; however, it does allow a small set of centralized servers to supervise the health of the operating nodes in your environment. There are five types of agentless monitors that cover the Windows, AIX, Linux, HP-UX, and Solaris environments.

The agentless monitors are multi-instance agents. After installing or deploying an agentless monitor on a machine, additional instances can be created via configuration. Each instance can communicate with up to 100 remote nodes.

Each type of agentless monitor can run on additional platforms beyond the type of platform it monitors. For example, the agentless monitor for Windows (which monitors only Windows operating systems) can run on any of the supported platforms: Windows, AIX, Solaris, HP-UX, Linux.

Specific operating system releases that a particular agentless monitor can monitor are detailed in Table 1. Check the user's guide for each agentless monitor regarding platform-specific requirements for the operating systems that agentless monitors can run with.

A computer that has one or more agentless monitors running on it is referred to as an agentless monitoring server. Each server node can support up to 10 active agentless monitor instances, in any combination of agentless monitor types; for example, 2 AIX, 2 HP-UX, 2 Linux, 2 Solaris, 2 Windows; or 4 Windows, 3 AIX, 3 Linux; or 5 Windows, 5 Solaris; or 10 HP-UX. Each instance can communicate with up to 100 remote nodes, which means a single agentless monitoring server can support as many as 1000 monitored systems (10 instances * 100 remote nodes per instance). By adding more server nodes, the number of monitored nodes increases into the thousands.

Figure 1

Agentless technology provides lightweight OS monitoring that targets key metrics along with basic situations meant to satisfy simple monitoring needs. Agentless monitoring provides speedy implementation and minimum agent deployment, including the deployment of updates; however, the need to poll the monitored node to retrieve its monitoring data increases network traffic, and real-time data availability is impacted both by the network delay and the reliance on polling. In addition, the implementation of Take Action commands for command and control is more powerful with the full-function agents than for agentless technology.

Key operating system metrics returned:

Default situations are provided for:

You can use these situations as is or as models for custom situations that meet your site's specific needs.

The agentless monitors monitor the distributed operating systems listed in Table 1. You can configure different data collectors for these environments.

Agentless monitor Product code Data collectors supported Operating system releases monitored
Agentless Monitoring for Windows OS R2 WMI1
Performance Monitor (PerfMon)1
Windows event log1
SNMP V1, V2c, V3 		Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition (32 bit) with SP1 or higher
Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition (32 bit) with R2 SP1 or higher
Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition (32 bit) with SP1 or higher
Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition (32 bit) with R2 SP1 or higher
Windows Server 2003 Datacenter Edition (32 bit) with SP1 or higher
Windows Server 2003 Datacenter Edition (32 bit) with R2 SP1 or higher
Windows 2003 Standard Edition (64 bit) with R2 SP2 or higher
Windows 2003 Enterprise Edition (64 bit) with R2 SP2 or higher
Windows Server 2003 Datacenter Edition (64 bit) with R2 SP2 or higher
Windows 2003 Server Enterprise Edition on Itanium2 (IA64) with R2 SP2 or higher
Windows Server 2008 Standard Edition (32 bit)
Windows Server 2008 Datacenter Edition (32 bit)
Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition (32 bit)Windows Server 2008 Standard Edition (64 bit)
Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition (64 bit)
Windows 2008 Enterprise Edition on Itanium2 (IA64)
Windows Vista Enterprise, Business, and Ultimate (32 bit)
Windows Vista Enterprise, Business, and Ultimate (64 bit)

IA64 machines running Windows are not supported.

Agentless Monitoring for AIX OS R3 SNMP V1, V2c, V3 AIX V6.x (64 bit)
Agentless Monitoring for Linux OS R4 SNMP V1, V2c, V3 RedHat Enterprise Linux 5 Intel (32 bit)
RedHat Enterprise Linux 5 on x86-64
RedHat Enterprise Linux 5 on Itanium 64 bit
RedHat Enterprise Linux 5 on iSeries and pSeries
RedHat Enterprise Linux 5 on zSeries (64 bit)
SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 Intel (32 bit) with SP3 or later
SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 on x86-64 (64 bit) with SP3 or later
SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 on Itanium (64 bit) with SP3 or later
SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 for iSeries and pSeries with SP3 or later
SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 for zSeries (31 bit) with SP3 or later
SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 for zSeries (64 bit) with SP3 or later
SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 Intel (32 bit)
SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 on x86-64 (64 bit)
SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 on Itanium (64 bit)
SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 for iSeries and pSeries (64 bit)
SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 for zSeries (64 bit)
Agentless Monitoring for HP-UX OS R5 SNMP V1, V2c, V3 HP-UX 11i v1 (B.11.11) (32/64) on PA-RISC
HP-UX 11i v2 (B.11.23) (64 bit) on PA-RISC
HP-UX 11i v3 (B.11.31) (64 bit) on PA-RISC
HP-UX 11i v2 (B.11.23) on Integrity (IA64)
HP-UX 11i v3 (B.11.31) on Integrity (IA64)
Agentless Monitoring for Solaris OS R6 CIM-XML
SNMP V1, V2c, V3 		Solaris V8 (SPARC) (32/64bit)
Solaris V9 (SPARC) (32/64bit)
Solaris V10 (SPARC) (32/64 bit)
Solaris V10 (x86-64) (64 bit)
Solaris V10 (Opteron) (64 bit)

1: To use one of the native Windows data collectors (WMI, PerfMon, the event log), the agentless monitoring server must run under Windows.

Recommends deploying a full-feature operating system agent to each agentless monitoring server to watch the CPU, memory, and network consumption of the agentless monitors themselves.


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Parent topic:

Agent deployments

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