Summary

It is clear that agent technologies are important to both MOM and SMS to enable their systems management functions. In this chapter, we covered the following areas:

• An overview of MOM agents

• Configuration and deployment of MOM agents

• SMS agents

With MOM, the options for agent deployment through computer discovery and manual deployment provide options for deployment based on the network environment and the nature of the computers being monitored. In addition, a less-featured mode of agentless monitoring is supported through MOM as well.

SMS agents support the many functions of SMS, including inventory for hardware and software, software metering to determine the usage for various applications, remote tools support for administrators to diagnose problems, and the advertised programs feature enabling users to have some options available for the acceptance of newly deployed software. These features are core to the systems management experience delivered by SMS, and the agents are an important part of the overall systems management and monitoring architectures for both MOM and SMS. In Chapter 8, we look at one of the major strengths of MOM—the Management Packs and related components to support operations management and monitoring features.