Agentless monitoring has been around for a while in ITM 6 and it gives you the ability to remotely monitor key operating metrics without installing a traditional ITM agent on the server itself.  A number of protocols are available to extract operating system information and have this info presented in the TEP, with the most commonly used one being the SNMP agentless monitor. SNMPv1, SNMPv2c and SNMPv3 monitoring is available out of the box, and you can have a proof-of-concept demo up-and-running pretty quickly using a default read-only community string, or you can make things much more secure, if desired, by using the  encrypted authorisation and privacy passphrases which are available when using SNMPv3.

A single, agentless monitoring agent can remotely monitor the operating system metrics of up to 100 SNMP targets, with up to 10 agentless monitors being able to be housed on a single server, so there is the potential to have 1000 servers monitored remotely by just one server without any physical ITM agents being installed on the targets. The agentless data collected below was taken using the out-of-the-box settings within ITM, with the exception of providing a default community string. There are plenty of guides on the net showing you how to set up SNMP on the platform of your choice, but in this instance I’m using CentOS 5.5 and a decent guide is available here.

A suprising amount of data is available to ITM using just SNMP, all of which is available for historical collection in the warehouse.

Overview

 

Disk

 

Memory

Network

 

Processes

 

Processor

 

System

 

Mark Delaney SYSTEMSMANAGED Ltd