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Monitor Expansion

We are working on expanding out monitoring to a recently acquired entity. I was thinking of putting a new poller in the Management Plane, this is where the phyiscial switches, and shared service servers will live. VSphere, EMC stuff, etc.

Then installing agents on each server in the business units, total servers to be less then 150. This would limit the number of ports that need to be allowed through the SourceFire.

The agents will upload their info back to the site poller then from the site poller will be sent back to my main site (less then 30 miles away 1Gig link)

Anyone see anything wrong with this, or possibly a better way to do this?

adatole jbiggley I know you guys operated/operate Cardinal Health, so I imagine you had some strict compliance rules to follow. That's what our main goal is, is to keep the business units as separated as possible.

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jbiggley

Yeah, we dealt with a lot of that same sort of regulatory compliance stuff, especially as we push into the international space. A polling engine in the management plane is the way to go. Agents are a fantastic way to get around the firewall issues (although not completely as they still need to be able to talk to/from the polling engine). They also introduce some extra complexity with managing an agent (isn't this why we went agentless in the first place!?) and some interesting monitor issues to work around (Agent Polling and PowerShell Scripts ) but this is the way that I would go if they aren't going to allow you to poll from the management layer into server layer.

solaradmin

Thank you for your input, much appreciated. Also thanks for the link. I would much prefer to go agentless but with the crazy port range of WMI I think the networking guys would not agree.

jbiggley

Alas, security often trumps ease of administration in some cases. As it should.

adatole

Agreed with jbiggley, this is your best design for now. The oft-requested "Mini-pollers" might make a difference but since they're not on the "what we're working on now" list, it's not even an option to dream about (yet. I continue to have hope. And nag when possible.)