Agentless monitoring is the ability to monitor remote resources in a manner that is similar to how local resources are monitored through providers and responses. If providers that support remote access to resources are used and the responses can execute its logic remotely, then those sets of rules work the same way on both agentless and agent-managed computers. Once identified, Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) starts monitoring the agentless computer as though there were an agent installed on the computer.
Note
The MOM Action account must have administrative user rights on the computers you want to manage without an agent.
The following can be achieved with agentless monitoring:
- State monitoring
- Heartbeat - The MOM management server pings the agentless computer at intervals specified by the user. If no response is received, an alert is raised for the Unavailable computer.
- Service discovery
- Performance collection - Microsoft Windows NT® performance counter and script-generated
- Internal service monitoring events
- Script execution - Including varsets
- Event collection - Timed, Windows Event Log, WMI, internally-generated, and script-generated
The script and command-line responses used in Timed events must leverage the new TargetComputerproperty in order to access the agentless server.
Agentless monitoring has the following limitations:
- It does not support application log providers.
- Descriptions of event log entries on the agentless machine are not displayed on the MOM Management Server unless it has the same EventLogmessages.dll file as the agentless computer. A workaround is to install the software for which you'd like to receive event log entries on the MOM Server.
- Agentless monitoring does not work through a firewall in typical configurations because agentless network traffic contains remote procedure call (RPC) and Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM).
- Not all management packs work in agentless mode. Therefore, it might not make operational sense for your management pack to work without an agent if the bulk of the monitoring scenarios leverage providers that are not supported without an agent.
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