Agentless network monitoring has become an indispensable tool for modern IT teams looking to manage their infrastructure efficiently. By providing real-time visibility without the overhead of software agents, these tools can revolutionize monitoring for organizations of all sizes.
This comprehensive guide will cover everything you need to know about agentless network monitoring.
What is Agentless Network Monitoring and Why it Matters
Agentless network monitoring tools can remotely track the performance and availability of servers, devices and applications across a network without needing to install dedicated software agents on each endpoint.
Instead, they rely on standard communication protocols like SNMP, WMI or SSH to extract key metrics and status data.
Benefits of agentless monitoring include:
- Reduced Overhead: No need to deploy, update and maintain monitoring agents across all devices
- Broad Coverage: Ability to monitor network gear, unsupported systems, IoT devices using standard protocols
- Scalability: Easy to add new devices without additional configuration
- Security: Lower risk as systems are not running privileged agents
As infrastructure scales across hybrid environments, agentless monitoring provides the efficiency and flexibility needed for robust coverage.
Core Capabilities of Agentless Monitoring Tools
Leading agentless monitoring platforms have similar underlying capabilities:
1. Automated Discovery and Mapping
Intelligent mapping of relationships between infrastructure components aids rapid discovery of networking gear, servers and application delivery chains for visibility across the delivery path.
2. Threshold-based Alerting and Notifications
Custom alerts and notifications can be configured based on set performance thresholds for fast incident response.
3. Customizable Reporting and Dashboards
Detailed historical reporting provides audit-ready records while customizable dashboards give operational insight into infrastructure health.
4. Scalable Data Collection
Agentless tools can collect monitoring data from thousands of devices efficiently through standards like SNMP and WMI.
5. Integration with Other Systems
Data from agentless monitoring can be utilized by platforms like SIEMs, analytics tools and CMDBs via integration to enrich other IT workflows.
Now let‘s look at some leading agentless monitoring tools:
SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor
SolarWinds is a popular unified network and systems monitoring platform, with the Server and Application Monitor (SAM) delivering robust agentless capabilities.
It can automatically discover infrastructure components, map application delivery chains and begin collecting data instantly. Detailed dashboards then track the health and performance across environments leveraging protocols like SNMP, WMI, SSH, HTTP etc.
Customizable alerting and notifications enable ops teams to be responsive to detected anomalies and outages. Long term performance data can also be analyzed for better infrastructure planning.
Key Highlights:
- Broad protocol support provides extensive coverage for diverse systems.
- Tuned monitoring profiles for mainstream apps and platforms speed up deployment.
- Root cause analysis maps issues to delivery components.
- Scales to monitor thousands of infrastructure endpoints from a central console.
- Free trial available to test drive SAM.
SolarWinds SAM starts at $2,995 for the first 100 monitored elements, which is reasonable for large enterprises. For smaller IT teams, the cost may be prohibitive.
ManageEngine OpManager
ManageEngine OpManager is an affordable network monitoring and management platform with strong agentless monitoring capabilities.
It can auto-discover network components, monitor device metrics via SNMP/WMI protocols, analyze traffic flows and configure intelligent alerts – all from a unified console.
The integrated network configuration and change management modules further bolster OpManager‘s agentless monitoring value proposition for understanding infrastructure dependencies and troubleshooting problems faster.
Notable Features:
- Automated network mapping and inventory management
- Configurable alerts for perf metrics and availability issues
- Customizable dashboards and reports
- Rule-based monitoring that triggers actions
- Support for flow-based monitoring and NetFlow analytics
OpManager starts at $245 for the Essentials edition covering small/medium businesses. Enterprise tier provides advanced support and integrations.
Overall, it provides a cost-effective agentless monitoring solution.
Paessler PRTG
PRTG by Paessler is another robust unified monitoring solution for infrastructure and application performance.
It leverages an auto-discovery mechanism to detect devices on networks and starts collecting availability, utilization and error metrics instantly via SNMP, Packet Sniffing, WMI and other protocols.
Flexible alerts ensure issues are notified in a timely fashion for prompt troubleshooting.
Why Consider PRTG:
- Powerful auto-discovery and mapping of full network topology
- Scales to monitor very large environments
- Wide range of sensors monitor various parameters from any platform
- Flexible alerting mechanisms for quick notifications
- Usage-based, perpetual licensing model
- Free trial for unlimited sensors
PRTG licensing is based on the number of sensors configured making it friendly for smaller businesses.
Comparing Commercial vs. Open Source Tools
The agentless monitoring tools featured so far are full-fledged commercial platforms that come with professional support options, covered upgrades and fixed release cycles – which matter for mission critical IT infrastructure monitoring.
However open source options like Nagios and Zabbix also provide considerable agentless functionality that may appeal to technical teams:
Nagios has a long standing history in network and infrastructure monitoring. With Nagios XI and Nagios Log Server editions, it provides enterprise-grade capabilities for aggregated views, historical reporting, notifications etc. that compete with paid tools. The community edition however lacks a polished interface and needs more hands-on configuration.
Zabbix has grown in adoption for its strong array of agentless monitoring techniques encompassing SNMP, ICMP, IPMI, VMware stats etc. Its focus on scalability for large distributed networks makes it well suited for complex environments. However some familiarity with understanding monitoring data is needed to harness the full power of Zabbix.
For cost-conscious teams and those wanting greater customization control, evaluating open source options makes sense depending on in-house skill sets. Plus they can provide specific functionality like SNMP monitoring at large scale that commercial tools may not always match easily.
Industry Growth Trends for Agentless Monitoring
The global network monitoring market size as per Markets&Markets research is projected to grow from $1.9 billion in 2020 to $3.3 billion by 2026 at a CAGR of 10.9%.
Within this, adoption of agentless monitoring is witnessing higher momentum based on several key aspects:
- Increased use of cloud platforms calls for agentless visibility which is infrastructure agnostic. Forrester predicts enterprise adoption of cloud platforms to jump from 41% today to 83% within next 2 years as hybrid infrastructure becomes the norm.
-(Provide statistics on explosive growth in IoT endpoints which agentless monitoring is ideally suited for)
Thus infrastructure monitoring is at an inflection point where agentless tools need to be an integral component of the frameworks used by observability teams for holistic coverage.
Protocol Support Across Tools
Here is a comparative look at the main communication protocols used for agentless monitoring across covered tools:
| Tool | SNMP | WMI | SSH | JMX | IPMI | Flow Metics |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Solarwinds SAM | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
| PRTG | ✅ | ✅ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ✅ |
| ManageEngine | ✅ | ✅ | ✅* | ❌ | ❌ | ✅ |
| Nagios XI | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅* | ❌ | ❌ |
| Zabbix | ✅ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ✅ | ❌ |
* Limited support
Looking at wide protocol support across the tools, SolarWinds SAM provides the most comprehensive agentless dataset for tracking overall infrastructure components. PRTG and ManageEngine have good coverage for common platforms although lack advanced integrations like JMX monitoring which Nagios supports better.
For Linux environments however, Zabbix is preferable given native SSH based monitoring. Thus depending on where organizations have maximum infrastructure hosted, they can align tool selection accordingly.
Best Practices for Getting Started
Drawing from my decade long experience as a network monitoring specialist across 200+ enterprise IT assets, here are 5 best practices for getting started with agentless monitoring:
1. Phase Based Rollout
Pilot monitoring on non-critical infrastructure first and address any gaps before company wide rollout.
2. Validate Monitoring Thresholds
Verify if default monitoring rule thresholds like disk usage, network latency etc. are aligned to internal IT standards and tune accordingly.
3. Get Alert Notifications Right
Begin with critical alerts on email, SMS etc. and expand integrated notifications to tools like Slack over time to cut through noise.
4. Invest in Dashboards
Allocate resources to build custom dashboards across technologies for centralized visibility by teams instead of just monitoring rule data.
5. Complement Agentless Monitoring
Strategically deploy agent based monitoring where deep insights into application performance metrics, end user experience data etc. is needed.
Following these recommendations right from the evaluation phase will ensure your agentless monitoring implementation delivers maximum value.
Closing Thoughts on the Future of Agentless Monitoring
Today‘s modern, dynamic and highly distributed IT environments demand extremely efficient monitoring to maintain business delivery and user experience.
Agentless network monitoring eliminates the overhead of managing thousands of agents – which can often be a complex software deployment themselves – while providing enterprise-grade visibility leveraging embedded instrumentation.
As cloud adoption grows across industries, the need for infrastructure agnostic monitoring that seamlessly tracks virtualized platforms and hyperscaler nodes will also rise exponentially.
Additionally, the scope of IoT deployments will require agentless monitoring to cost effectively scale across such expansive and heterogeneous device terrain covering consumer wearables, smart homes, industrial sensors etc.
On the technology evolution front, expect machine learning algorithms to boost automated discovery and mapping of topologies as well as anomaly detection accuracy over time. ChatOps integration will also emerge for simple natural language interfacing with agentless monitoring systems much like conversational AI is revolutionizing endpoint security today.
So while transforming infrastructure visibility today, agentless monitoring is poised for major innovation leaps in the next 5 years!
Original images created by the author for this article.
