With many virtualization monitoring software options in the market, which is the right one for your entire IT stack? In this post, we’ll explore one of the crucial aspects of making this decision: the choice between agent-based, agentless, and hybrid monitoring solutions. Each approach has its own set of advantages and trade-offs, making it essential to understand which one aligns best with your organization’s needs
When to choose agentless monitoring for virtualization
If you are looking for speed and agility, you should go for a virtualization monitoring software that is agentless. You won’t get tangled up in needing approval from your security team or additional privileges for installation. Plus, you might have to work with compact machines or servers (like Windows Nano Server). Who wants to hang around for patch windows?
If you find yourselves groaning “Not another agent,” it’s time to seriously consider the agentless life. After all, you’re probably up to your necks in agents already, across endpoint management, backup, and IDS.
Danger zone: When agentless monitoring falls flat
Agentless monitoring usually collects lower amounts of data. And if you lose connectivity between your sites—if your network goes down, say—you’ll be completely in the dark. Not so good. Agentless monitoring needs extra hardware resources on source and target machines, too. Credential management can also be sticky: Using high-privileged user credentials might up your security risks, and keeping tabs on credentials can get complex.
When to choose agent monitoring for virtualization
If you’re processing shed loads of data, you’ll need agent monitoring. Take a major bank: They’ll have multiple agents performing specific roles, as they’ll be working with too much data to process remotely.
Agents are also the right call if you might lose connectivity between your agent and your machines. Even if your network’s down, agents can still collect and store your data.
And if your firm is hot on security, go for agent monitoring. (Rapid explainer: Agentless monitoring usually requires credentials to collect data and some enterprises won’t share these credentials with 3rd parties.) Just bear in mind that you’ll need to figure out what kind of permissions you require, for what kind of commands, on what kind of OS. Gripping, we know.
Danger zone: When agent monitoring flops
Installation eats uptime
Cards on the table: Agent monitoring won’t give you the easiest of starts. Installation is time-consuming—so make sure it’s the right route before you commit.
Some agents might change system settings
This only happens with the heavier beasts, but you’d be wise to keep an eye out.
Updates can be risky
Updates delete old agents and install new ones, so there is scope for complications. You might need to wait for patch windows, too, which can lose your precious time.
Best of both: Hybrid virtualization monitoring software
We’re pioneering an alternative way to do virtualization monitoring at VirtualMetric. It mixes the advantages of agent and agentless, and we call it hybrid monitoring.
How does hybrid monitoring work?
We deploy a running process when we connect to your machines (and if you lose connectivity, you’ll still store data locally). But you don’t have to deal with agents, updates, or changing system settings. It’s all automatic.
Why choose hybrid virtualization monitoring for your IT stack?
- Save yourself time
- Deploy in just a few clicks—no need to pour hours into deploying monitoring for each and every machine. Say goodbye to waiting for patch windows, too.
- High resilience, high availability
- Just like agent monitoring.
- Flexible and easy to use
- Just like agentless monitoring.
- Increase your security
- Our hybrid monitoring works fully in read-only modes, so it’s way less vulnerable to cyberattacks.
Zero password sharing
Using CyberArk and Active Directory Authentication, we run agentless monitoring without storing any credentials. It’s a super useful workaround for high-security firms (if we do say so ourselves).
Hybrid monitoring keeps getting stronger
Using multiple agents and lots of resources across your machines is no way to run things. Go for a single, hybrid way to collect your data instead—and we think you’ll be chuffed with the difference. Our hybrid monitoring has a really low footprint: Only 28 megabytes for all the functionalities you need. There’s just one drawback we should tell you about: Some companies frown on sorcery at work 😉
So, which way to go? Agent vs agentless vs hybrid
Choose agentless monitoring for:
- Lower data volumes
- Monitoring lots of virtual (or physical) machines
- When you can’t use agents (for device or capacity reasons)
Choose agent monitoring for:
- High data volumes
- When you can’t use agentless (for security reasons)
- For laptops or other mobile devices that regularly change IP address
Choose hybrid monitoring for:
- Combining the strengths of agent monitoring and agentless monitoring
Old task, new tricks: Advances in data collection
You know it and we know it: Collecting data needs to be automated and easy, with zero user configuration. And we all need to be able to transform raw data into meaningful structures. At VirtualMetric, we do this via Virtual Pipelines. We’re shifting this transformation load to edge computing, too. We transform your data at the edge so you don’t have to deal with massive central data silos, and you can shrink total resource use at your main site.
Leave a Reply