It is interesting the number of products, the variations in pricing, and the overall affectiveness of remote monitoring and alerting applications. It would seem that the field is cluttered with agent versus agentless scenarios and each company is touting itself for depth of information, low overhead on the systems and ease of configuration / distribution.
Each application and subsequent vendor has its own tale to tell, yet the bottom line should always be – “Am I getting the information I need to anticipate or react to a possible situation?”
We have looked at products from Computer Associates, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Mercury-Interactive and others. We have seen the benefits of both agents and agentless installations. We have decided on the agentless product and have had a great success with the rollout of this product across 18 or our campuses. We are impresses with the ease of installation, upgrades and enhancements. We are also impressed with the flexibility of the thresholds, although a little more granularity in this area and in report generation would be warranted.
I would like to know what others are using and if there is a preference in the field on agent versus agentless monitoring products.