Considerations for choosing HP Agentless Management

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When to use to OS-based agents
In some cases Agentless Management is not the best choice. This section expands on the information in Table 1 using
examples of cases when OS-based agents continue to be the best monitoring and reporting solution.
Monitoring performance
If you want to detect, analyze, and explain hardware performance bottlenecks on HP ProLiant servers, Insight Control
performance management (ICperf) is an effective software solution to accomplish those objectives. ICperf provides the
tools you need to receive proactive notification of developing bottleneck conditions, and debug existing performance
issues. You can monitor performance on one or more servers and log the information to a database for later analysis or
reporting, and set up proactive notification using the HP SIM notification mechanism.
HP SIM installs ICperf on the same server as the HP SIM console and requires data from specific set of OS-based agents,
in this case, Insight Management Performance agents. These agents record OS hardware and software performance
counters and play them back for ICperf.
Monitoring storage networks
Agentless Management with AMS currently features the ability to monitor Smart Array controllers attached to internal
drives and iSCSI SAS/SATA HBAs. There continue to be situations in which you need to use traditional OS-based agents to
monitor elements of the storage network. You need OS-based agents to monitor:
• ProLiant direct-attached storage not on a Smart Array controller
• ProLiant direct-attached storage in an expansion cabinet (JBOD). In addition to the drives, you want to monitor drive
power supplies and fans.
• Fibre Channel/FCoE HBA networks - You can use AMS to monitor these HBAs, but not information about the storage
network itself.
Other reasons to install OS-based agents
There are other reasons to install OS-based agents. If you are managing a ProLiant Gen8 server using HP SIM 7 or HP
Insight Control 7, these reasons include:
• Unique features – Use OS-based agents when you need the unique features supplied by the Insight agents or
providers, such as the ability to set disk utilization thresholds that generate an event when crossed.
• Consistency - You can continue to utilize existing practices for management established with earlier ProLiant
generations and migrate, or not migrate, to Agentless Management at your convenience.
• Third-party management applications - Unless specifically enabled to understand iLO and Agentless Management,
most management applications will treat the iLO as a separate device from the host in which it resides, and will
present host information separately from the information gathered from iLO. In this case, continuing to utilize the
management agents or providers will give you an integrated view of health and other metrics.
• Health threshold - Use OS-based agents when you want to use a system health threshold for disk utilization.
Conclusion
HP Agentless Management offers important advantages over traditional OS-based agents. You have access to SNMP
reporting on all core server hardware conditions without relying on OS-based agents, even in pre-OS conditions. This
means you get reporting regardless of OS and without incurring server processor overhead. Use AMS to deliver more
information about the server and the OS than you get with Agentless Management alone. AMS lets you use only the OS-
based agents you need in a lightweight service. This means faster reporting with less overhead.
AMS provides most of the critical OS-related reporting that you need, but there are some situations where it makes
sense to continue using traditional OS-based agents. When this is the case, HP Insight Agents are the solution. They
provide the monitoring you need while allowing you to aggregate and manage your servers effectively.
We recommend that you check iLO and AMS updates as support expands to cover more system events.