We recently were part of discussions with existing and potential customers that included weighing the pros and cons of using proprietary agents in conjunction with network monitoring tools. In addition, and rather coincidentally, I ran across a blog listing out a bunch of “myths” associated with IT Operations management, which makes some good points. Myth # 3 is “Heavy Proprietary Agents Are Preferable Because They Deliver More Complete Monitoring.”
Our discussions obviously weren’t about utilizing SNMP agents, which are non-proprietary, ubiquitous and widely understood (not that SNMP agents do not suffer from shortcomings). There are specific things to consider, however, when deploying proprietary agents associated with network monitoring. In general, there’s a seemingly straightforward trade off when deploying proprietary agents: the ability to collect more/better information vs. the additional overhead in deploying and managing agents. Although the additional IT management burden may be considered negligible to proponents of proprietary agents, it is this very issue that kicked off the discussions we had with rather frustrated IT managers.
In more than one case this past couple weeks, we were asked if network monitoring functionality that currently relied upon proprietary agents could be duplicated without using agents. The networks being monirtored were relatively large, with thousand’s of entities being managed, and supported by a relatively small (and overworked!) IT team. Customer comments expressed frustration over needing to spend more time managing the agents rather than doing the more “value added” IT Operations management that was supposed to be enabled by deploying agents.
It was surprising to see just how much additional burden these IT managers were experiencing with agents once the network got to a certain scale. In both cases, howver, the customer was able to find a way to duplicate the functionality either with SNMP or by utilizing other methods or more flexible tools to get the job done without the added hassle of managing agents.
I am sure each case will be different, and there are scenarios were proprietary agents will provide the value to justify deploying them, but network operators should be wary of the burden in deployting proprietary agents as their networks grows, and should fully evaluate the viable alternatives that are available.