Agent-based vs. Agentless Discovery Overview

To collect inventory information, you can deploy Universal Discovery agents on client or server machines. The UD agent provides a secured communication channel between the Data Flow Probe and the Nodes being discovered. After setting up the secure communication channel, Universal Discovery deploys and activates scanners onto the Nodes being discovered. The Scanners scan the Nodes for inventory information and store the scanned results in scan files which are downloaded to the Data Flow Probe through the secured communication channel established with the UD agent.

When the UD agent is installed, collection of software utilization information is enabled. The UD Agent also enables you to benefit from the Call Home feature. Call Home is useful in the case where a Node was unavailable for scanning for a long period. It enables the UD agent to notify the Data Flow Probe that the Node is currently available for scanning.

Although agentless discovery does not require the installation of dedicated agents on the servers that are to be discovered, it does depend on native OS or standard agents that are already installed such as SNMP, WMI, TELNET, SSH, NETBIOS, and others. Other discovery capabilities are based on application-specific protocols such as SQL, JMX, SAP, Siebel, and so on. For more information, see "Supported Protocols" in the Supported Content section of the Content Help.