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SAM-WMi or Agent Based

Hello,

Need your suggestions and inputs.

I am planning to build a setup for SAM in which I will be remotely monitoring 200 servers for different DC over different VPN. I dont want use separate pollers, My concern is incase if I use WMI to poll I am afraid it might take more network bandwith, So I am planning to go with Agent based deployment. So kindly advise which method is best in my scenario.

Thanks

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Accepted answers

aLTeReGo

In all fairness, the problem prawij‌ described above is somewhat unique. I have been unable to find any another reported case reporting similar behavior with agents. I don't deny it's happening in prawij‌'s environment, rather that this is not indicative behavior we have seen in other environments. We have some customers with thousands of Agents deployed without issue.

What prawij‌ states regarding reboot notifications is indeed more of a cosmetic bug that will be addressed in a forthcoming release. The issue is that the agent looks to see if Windows is requesting a reboot due to Windows Updates or any other software install that the Microsoft Installer would block any further installations of until the server was rebooted. This value is set by the Windows operating system on the monitored endpoint under the following registry keys.

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Component Based Servicing\RebootPending

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsUpdate\Auto Update\RebootRequired

This does not mean the agent isn't working, but that any updates to the agent after upgrading SAM could be blocked by the Windows Install engine due to a pending reboot.

All comments

HolyGuacamole

In a bandwidth sensitive design, SNMP has the least impact and WMI has the most. Agent is very efficient in terms of bandwidth usage but of course will be more than SNMP.

amarnath_r

Hi HolyGuacmole,

Would it be reliable to use agents? Most of the servers are business critical and I don't want to compromise.

HolyGuacamole

Yes. It is being used in production in various environments.

aLTeReGo

Agents are far more resilient that SNMP also, as they will operate independently of the polling engine and cache their results locally when/if connectivity between the Orion server and the monitored endpoint is severed. Communication between Orion and the managed endpoint is also encrypted, which is not possible using the Windows native SNMP daemon. Also the agent can operate through a proxy server, or handle NAT traversal with ease; in most cases without the need to create one-to-one NATs, port forwarding, or configuring a VPN tunnel at the remote site.

prawij

We've had problems with the agents (actually the SWJobEngineSvc2.exe and SWJobEngineWorker2x64.exe processes that the agent process spawns) taking up significant amounts of RAM (300-400+ MB), we've gone back to WMI/SNMP until we understand why this is happening. Also when you are monitoring via agent the server will often need a reboot for agent based polling to take effect/or when it updates the plugins. We also had an issue a couple days ago where the agent wouldn't report the last reboot time correctly on a server, despite multiple reboots.

I would highly recommend trying the agent out in a dev/test environment prior to pushing out to 200 prod servers.

aLTeReGo

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Component Based Servicing\RebootPending

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsUpdate\Auto Update\RebootRequired

This does not mean the agent isn't working, but that any updates to the agent after upgrading SAM could be blocked by the Windows Install engine due to a pending reboot.

bartsigler

I agree with aLTeReGo's response in this specific scenario. I would like to add that The primary reason we went with SolarWinds over other products was because of the Agent and its ability to initiate outbound communications that are Encrypted and Secure. Also the Agent initiated communications didn't require us to open Firewall ports inbound into the Data Centers and this was a requirement.

amarnath_r

‌tthanks alterego and prawji for your valuable inputs.. much appreciated