Everyone agrees that the success of your virtualized or cloud initiatives depends on the ability to guarantee performance of these systems. Anyone who’s in IT understands this necessity. But did you realize that software-based agents might be holding you back from achieving this goal?
In a physical world, agents have traditionally served a purpose – being especially useful in areas such as backup and anti-virus protection. And agent-based solutions can still bring some value in certain scenarios, even application performance management.
But – be warned – in a virtualized environment, there are three big reasons to stay away from agents, and they are:
- Agents don’t scale.
- Agents bring additional complexity.
- Agents waste valuable resources.

Virtualized and cloud environments can scale up to 100s of thousands of dynamic and interactive elements. Agents bring a source of resistance to these environments that work against your overall objectives. Say, for example, you have a guest agent in every VM. This not only severely restricts your ability to scale but also limits the extensibility that you need to take data feeds from multiple silos.
To learn more and to read the entire article at its source, please refer to the following page, 3 Reasons to Avoid Agents in a Virtualized World (and When Booking a Hawaiian Vacation)
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