Agentless Management Overview

  • Article

Agentless management enables Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 (MOM) to monitor remote resources in a manner that is similar to how local resources are managed through providers and responses. MOM provides an infrastructure for agentless management that enables you to target regular rules used on agent-managed computers against agentless managed computers. When a computer to be managed is identified as agentless, MOM monitors the agentless computer as if there is an agent installed on the computer. Agentless management is limited by the type of providers and response types that are used in the rules. If providers that support remote access to resources are used, and the responses can execute logic remotely, then those sets of rules will work the same way on both agentless and agent-managed computers.

The following monitoring scenarios are possible with agentless management:

  • State monitoring

  • Service discovery

  • Performance collection (Windows and script generated)

  • Internal service monitoring events

  • Script execution (including varsets)

  • Heartbeat (ping)

  • Event collection (Windows event log, internally generated, and script generated)

Agentless management does not allow

  • Application log providers

  • Event description collection

Note

    Agentless management does not work through a firewall in typical configurations because agentless network traffic contains remote procedure call (RPC) and DCOM communications.

Not all Management Packs can work in agentless mode. You might not need your Management Pack to work agentlessly if the bulk of your monitoring scenarios use providers that are not supported agentlessly.

The Management Servers Action Account must have administrative privileges on all target computers using agentless management.