October 23, 2007

When we built Longitude, we were intent on making it an agentless product because our customers had been asking for monitoring software that was quicker to deploy and easier to maintain than agent-based software; and in some cases, corporate policies discouraged or even prohibited the installation of monitoring software on production servers. But there are actually times when an agent becomes necessary. For example, sometimes a user has a computer or group of computers that are otherwise unable to communicate with Longitude’s management station for various reasons. This could be because the computers to be monitored are in another domain. In other cases Longitude is installed on an open source system (Linux) and the user needs to monitor Windows computers. What does the user do in these situations? The solution is simple: Longitude’s stand-alone statistics server can act as a mini-agent and enable data collection.

The statistics server is the component of Longitude responsible for collecting data. It is installed as part of the full install of Longitude, but additional statistics servers can be installed – almost like mini-agents – on additional computers or networks when the structure of the network does not permit communication between a computer (or group of computers) and the Longitude management station.

For example, if a customer running on Windows servers has two domains, Longitude installed in one domain would not be able to gather data agentlessly on computers located in a separate domain, unless the same account and password is used on both machines. By installing a statistics server on one server in the second domain, Longitude is able to collect data from the computers in that domain and send it back to the Longitude management station via a WMI connection, as if all of the monitored computers were all a part of one single domain.

Another reason a user might need additional statistics servers would be for scalability. If a customer is monitoring a large number of machines (for example, more than 1,000), it makes sense to break these up into groups – each with their own statistics server – to collect data. The data is then consolidated by Longitude for seamless reporting across the entire network.

From the examples above, you can see that there are times when a “mini-agent” becomes necessary. Longitude’s statistics servers make monitoring across domains and operating systems possible without any disruption in data collection and reporting.

Posted by Dick Levin, VP of Development