A digital illustration of an IT professional analyzing monitoring dashboards on a large screen with graphs, charts, and performance metrics, emphasizing IT monitoring strategies.

Agent-less vs Agent-based Monitoring

In today’s digital world, IT infrastructure reliability and performance are becoming critical to business success. Monitoring, in effect, acts as the backbone of such efforts in enabling organizations to detect issues at an early stage, optimizing resource utilization, and minimizing downtime. However, finding the right way to monitor may be a challenge as modern IT environments are growing more complex. There are two major approaches mainly: agent-based monitoring and agent-less monitoring; each with various advantages and challenges. Understand the difference; understand the strength, the limitation, and thus make an educated choice. This blog compares side-by-side two different approaches, presenting Xitoring, which offers combined strengths from both for the comprehensive, efficient, and scalable monitoring of infrastructure.

What is Agent-less Monitoring?

Agent-less monitoring refers to the process of monitoring and data collection from servers, network devices, and other IT components without the need for software agents on the monitored systems. It would, therefore, rely on other external mechanisms to gather information. This approach thus becomes highly useful in an environment where deploying agents is either not practical or highly undesirable. There are generally two ways in which agent-less monitoring is done:

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