I wanted to share the latest whitepaper from INETCO with Bank Innovation members:

Agents vs Agentless: Extending the Debate from Application Performance Management (APM) to Busines Transaction Management (BTM) Solutions

This whitepaper was co-written by Loki Jorgenson, Chief Scientist & Stacy Gorkoff, Director of Strategic Marketing for INETCO. 

It was written to help IT operations and application support teams find clarity on:

• The differences between agent and agentless application monitoring systems
• The pros and cons associated with these various data gathering techniques and how they relate to your desired monitoring scope
• The emergence of business transaction management (BTM) and how it extends traditional application performance management capabilities
• How agentless BTM extends monitoring boundaries and simplifies the management of applications located in distributed enterprise environments

Here’s an overview of the whitepaper:  

The pros and cons of agentless versus agentbased application performance management (APM) solutions continue to be a common debate amongst IT operations and applications support teams. But over the past few years, the definitions and examples of when and when not to use agents has become more blurred. This is partially due to misrepresentation by vendors. It is also because many IT groups are still trying to figure out the best way to manage increasingly complex business transaction environments.

To efficiently isolate performance issues within these dynamic enterprise environments, IT operations and applications support teams have traditionally used a combination of agentless and agent-based monitoring software. Many have also expanded their deep dive application performance management tools to include the “next generation” of application performance management tools. These are real-time, network level business transaction management solutions designed to enable the “holistic” monitoring of all applications and infrastructure components touched within a transaction’s lifecycle.

In the case of business transaction management (BTM) solutions, the benefits of an agentless deployment become exceedingly clear. Effective transaction monitoring requires the continuous capture and correlation of all data exchanges and response times that make up an end-to-end transaction path. This granular transaction data needs to be gathered without affecting the capacity or performance of critical applications – a feat that can only be achieved with an agentless transaction management solution.

To learn more, you can download a free copy of the whitepaper from:

http://www.inetco.com/whitepaper/agent-vs-agentless-btm-whitepaper/

Thanks,

Dan