Agentless V/S Agent Based Discovery

What is the right solution for discovering your assets ?

Both approaches have their benefits & challenges.

Discover IT Assets

Agentless Discovery/Scan

As the name suggests, an Agentless Network Scanning & Discovery tool is one that doesn’t require any agent or client installed on the end point to gather information about the IT Asset.  An agentless asset management system remotely gathers all the data on your devices from a central tool that your technicians run on the server.

These tools typically collect data either by using management protocols or specifications like SNMP, WMI, WinRM, CIM, SSH or  leveraging APIs provided by the target systems. Some tools use a combination of management protocols and APIs to obtain a complete hardware and software information across all assets.

Agent Based Discovery

Agent-based discovery places an “agent” on each discovery target. This software agent is a piece of code that runs on the target machine, and “calls home” (could be a central server) to report back its findings.

The agent, being local, is able to gather data and “store” it, delivering hours, days, weeks, or even months of data in large chunks if an when a connection does become available.  Data can be transported on a more regular, scheduled basis if desired.

Euladox ITAM Discovery Methods

Euladox ITAM provides for both methods of discovery:

  • Agentless Discovery through Euladox Discovery Satellite
  • Agent Based Discovery through Euladox Standalone Agent

The preferred, or generally recommended, method by Euladox ITAM is the Agentless Discovery. But customers can use either of the two or a combination of the two methods depending on their specific needs.

Discovery Method Decision Criteria

The decision criteria for using agent or agentless discovery are:

  1. Asset discovery & inventory
  2. Depth of data collected
  3. Maintenance & Ease of Initiation
  4. Scalability & Reliability
  5. Discovery of SNMP devices
  6. Accurate Inventory available for agent installation

When to Use Agents

Agent-based discovery is ideal for situations where you suffer from network quality or availability issues because these solutions are less dependent on the network. They are also good for discovering endpoints that may sometimes be disconnected from the corporate network.

Secondly, depth of data is an important criterion. In case you are interested in collecting information about certain BIOS foot prints (example : number of keystrokes or mouse clicks) then agent based discovery is the way to go.

Some Benefits of Agent-less Discovery

  • No Effort to Install : Since there is no agent or software to be installed on any of the end-points, the cost & effort to deploy is virtually zero.
  • Less Computing Resources of the target systems are utilized by the agent-less probes compared to an installed agent.
  • Maintenance Costs for agent-less systems are much lower. New updates to the discovery agent need not be deployed on each end-point decreasing maintenance costs.
  • Deployment Speed is another major advantage of agent-less systems. Deploying and testing agents can be a very massive project for large enterprises.
  • Reliable Data Collection: Agent-less discovery uses standard OS and system defined protocols to pick up inventory data.
  • No need to have accurate existing inventory. The agent-less probe will scan & search for asset end-points
  • No agents means lower vendor lock-in

Agentless Discovery Functionality

Euladox Discovery Satellite

The Euladox ITAM Discovery Satellite is the most modern agent-less inventory discovery system for IT Assets. It uses the multiple standard protocols for conducting discovery:

  • SNMP for networking devices (routers, switches etc)
  • SNMP for peripheral devices (printers, scanners etc)
  • WMI, WinRM for Windows servers and desktops
  • SSH for Unix & Linux systems
  • WMI, CIM, SSH for hypervisors (VMWare, Hyper-V, Xen Server etc)

Specialized Adaptors

Euladox Discovery Satellite has specialized adaptors for

  • Oracle Database family
  • Oracle Weblogic & Middleware family
  • MS SQL Server
  • IBM DB2
  • IBM MQ
  • Oracle E Business Suite
  • VMware VSphere and VCenter
  • Adope Creative Cloud
  • Java
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