Is the circus coming to town?

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I’ve never seen a satisfied customer with an agent-based analysis tool.  But why is that?

Traditional analytics products use agent based technology and require a widespread deployment approach.  Although the potential for accuracy is 100%, the typical accuracy realised is commonly significantly less than this. The agent deployment and management creates a significant overhead on infrastructure and resources.  Managing all these software agents distributed across an organisation’s network becomes like the circus trick of managing a whole host of spinning plates on poles – except that there are too many plates to manage.  Not all agents work seamlessly with the client platform. Getting all agents to run at the same time is a constant trick.  Other network devices and rules and software agents – especially security based – stop agents running or stop access to information.  With the focus and energy on running thousands of agents, there are always some that are falling “off the poles”, while others were just starting to spin – they don’t all manage to work at the same time to provide the analysis information required – to give the single, environment image.

This approach has been the same across the industry and so analysis has become a pariah – an unwanted overhead that runs for weeks and produces inaccurate results that are subsequently challenged and often ignored.

So, if agents cause overheads that get in the way of analysing the environment, what’s the answer?

The best way to deal with this is to use a “light-touch” analysis tool, which doesn’t impact on the network environment and doesn’t demand time-consuming interviews with personnel by consultants.  By reducing the number of touchpoints, but using these touchpoints in new innovative ways – much higher degrees of accuracy and a fuller picture can be achieved.  The information that comes out of this analysis is immediate and provides the ability to simulate “what-if?” scenarios to allow customers to quickly visualise their environment and quickly and accurately define the requirements for an alternative technology approach.

I believe that light-touch, agentless technology is the only way to go, especially in large-scale infrastructure.  Have you used agent technology and seen the downsides?

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4 Responses to “Is the circus coming to town?”

1. Edgardo Mccarraher says:

   February 22, 2012 at 12:30 pm

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   February 22, 2012 at 6:20 pm

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3. French says:

   February 22, 2012 at 8:03 pm

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4. Diabetes says:

   February 23, 2012 at 6:28 am

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