Version

All

Date

16 Aug 2004

Summary

When monitoring multiple machines with remote monitoring over slow links,

the network bandwidth used by the monitoring engine can be significant.

Technical Background

Argent has the unique feature of agent-optional monitoring.

You can choose to use or not use agents for your monitoring needs.

Remote Monitoring without agents is easy to configure and deploy, but monitoring a

great number of machines across a slow WAN connection in this way may consume a

substantial amount of network bandwidth.

Resolution

The recommendation when monitoring numerous machines across a WAN link is to

deploy a monitoring engine (agent) at each remote locations.

Using local monitoring engines at the remote site can reduce network utilization by a huge amount.

In this analysis, deploying remote monitoring engines reduced the network usage from over 1.5 MB/Sec to around 200 KB/Sec. (see screenshot)

This is the recommended way of monitoring over slow links.