Chapter 3. Managing Agents

Chapter 2 explained planning and deployment of a MOM 2005 infrastructure, but gave light treatment to the deployment and management of agents . This chapter provides the details on how agents function and provides guidance on common tasks that will manage your agents.

Agent management consists of installing and uninstalling tasks, troubleshooting tasks, and updating tasks. Out of these, you will do mostly installing and uninstalling tasks. Like the deployment of the management group components, once an agent is installed on a managed computer there should be little hands-on interaction with it. If the agent is not responding or you need to get other information from it, you may have to do some troubleshooting .

MOM 2005 is very flexible with managing agents and monitoring computers. It has the ability to monitor computers in a wide variety of network environments and under various security requirements. For example, you can deploy agents across domain boundaries, into a workgroup, or across a firewall or a slow WAN link. MOM 2005 provides this flexibility through groups of settings that can be applied to individual management servers or across the management group as a whole.

Since understanding the different combinations of these settings can be difficult, agent management will be discussed in the context of the Leaky Faucet environment where it is useful. Through these examples, you'll learn the considerations for deploying and managing agents across firewalls, into untrusted networks, and how to multi-home an agent.