Monitoring tools that use agents offer excellent, detailed visibility into server and application behavior. But agents can be difficult to distribute, often consume server CPU and memory resources, and can be another point of failure within a server.

While an agent-less monitoring tool cannot supply the wealth of detail of an agent-based product, its simpler environment, reduced risk of crashing a server and easier deployment make it a compelling and tempting choice.

Heroix says its new Longitude 3.0 agent-less system can monitor a network well enough to give servers and applications the same uptime and availability as agent-based tools. We recently tested Heroix and found that it serves up a plethora of useful and timely data on server and application behaviors. It kept tabs on several specific server platforms and applications, was easy to deploy and use, produced helpful reports, and didn't cost an arm and a leg in license fees.