Implementation Guide › Planning Your Environment › Agent Planning › About Agents

About Agents

Agents run as a service or daemon after installation and are optional product components, used in one or more of the following situations:

• A small, remote site needs to collect event data but does not require a full CA User Activity Reporting Module soft appliance.
• You need to filter data at the event source to reduce network traffic or the amount of data being stored.
• You need to guarantee event delivery to the event log store for compliance.
• You need to secure log transmission across the network with data encryption.

Agents act as process managers for connectors that collect event data from specific applications, operating systems, or databases. Agents deliver connector management commands such as start, stop, and restart from the Agent Explorer interface in the CA User Activity Reporting Module. Agents also apply connector configuration changes and binary updates.

You can install agents on individual event sources, or you can install agents on remote host servers to gather events from more than one event source. The CA User Activity Reporting Module server installation automatically installs its own agent. You can use this default agent for direct syslog event collection.

You can also view the status of any agent from the Agent Explorer on any CA User Activity Reporting Module server in the network. Agents have a watchdog service that restarts an agent in the event that it stops unexpectedly, and monitors for agent and connector binary updates. Agents also send self-monitoring events to the event log store for tracking of changes and status.