What is agentless monitoring?
Application monitoring is the process of measuring application behavior based on collected data to identify and resolve application issues before they impact the business bottom line and end-users. It’s a dynamic process whose difficulty depends on the complexity of monitor applications, used environments, and scale. But what is agentless monitoring and why you need it?
Commonly, we use Application performance monitoring (APM) to describe a set of tools that support this process and allows us to monitor and track the performance of software, and solve issues (not only performance) that may arise. APM should help you in monitoring CPUs, RAM, Garbage collector usage, error rates, and overall traffic. It also should integrate with various languages and frameworks, trace end-to-end transactions, and give in-depth insights to ensure problems are detected and corrected quickly.
To include the tool in this category it must:
Monitor and track the performance and response time of software or web applications with specific insights into the statistics such as the number of transactions processed by the application or the response time to process such transactions.
Visualize data for a better understanding of performance metrics and assist in solving performance issues.
Error monitoring – a set of tools that help triage and fix errors in different web and mobile applications.
Database monitoring – a set of tools that will help understand health and performance impact on your apps.
Track baseline of performance metrics and alert administrators when performance varies.
Also, it would be very helpful to have
- User monitoring – set of tools that help to understand the impact of front-end application on the end-user behavior.
- 3rd party systems monitoring – set of tools that will help understand how 3rd party integrations are impacting your applications.
What is Agentless monitoring and why you need it?
APMs and error monitoring tools require you to install agents or manually instrument your code to gather necessary data that will help you understand the performance of your application.
The first problem you could encounter is that you can’t install monitoring agents in cloud-native applications e.g. using serverless functions because you don’t own the infrastructure so you don’t have administrator rights to install and run the agent. The other problem is that when you don’t have automatic instrumentation you need to manually add the integration to your code to trace transactions and gather errors when they occur.
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Current limitations of existing APMs or error monitoring tools could be compared to the situation that you try to eavesdrop on what happens in the other room thru the wall. It could be helpful but you need to think out many things and blurs the information you are looking for.
With automatic instrumentalization and agentless monitoring, you don’t need to install any agents or manually instrument your apps so you could monitor serverless functions or microservice apps without any limitations of environments.
This is something that could be easily done with RevDeBug that goes even further. It not only instrument automatically your apps during the build process (you don’t need to add anything to your code, just dependencies to your build process), but also become part of your app so you don’t need to install any agents to monitor your apps and get detailed code execution visualization that led to the issue.
Check out how easy is to use RevDeBug and automatically instrument your .NET, .NET core, JAVA and JavaScript apps.
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