Installation Guide › Installing CA Virtual Assurance › Installation Requirements and Considerations › Comparison between SystemEDGE and CA Systems Performance LiteAgent

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Comparison between SystemEDGE and CA Systems Performance LiteAgent

CA Virtual Assurance ships with two monitoring agents, SystemEDGE and CA Systems Performance LiteAgent.

SystemEDGE is an SNMP-compliant agent providing access to monitored elements using an industry standard MIB. SystemEDGE also provides an extensible plug-in (AIM) interface which allows additional monitoring, such as vCenter Server, Solaris Zones or Service Response monitoring. SystemEDGE provides status and performance data to the CA Virtual Assurance manager. SystemEDGE is mandatory to manage virtual environments and servers.

CA Systems Performance LiteAgent is a lightweight monitoring agent, providing access to many performance metrics on Windows, UNIX, and Linux. On Windows, including the ability to monitor virtually all metrics included in the Performance Registry. Monitoring is performed on-demand based on a request from a manager component. CA Systems Performance LiteAgent provides performance data to the CA Virtual Assurance manager.

For further details on the differences between SystemEDGE and CA Systems Performance LiteAgent, refer to the following table:

Feature

SystemEDGE Agent

CA Systems Performance LiteAgent

SNMP-compliant agent

Y

N

SNMP-based traps

Y

N

Zero configuration agent

N

Y

SNMP v1/v2 communications

Y

N

SNMP v3 communications

Y

N

Monitoring restriction by computer name/address

Y

N

CAM-based communications

Configuration operations only

Y

Support for multiple manager instances

Y

Y

Support for Spectrum IM

Y

N

Support for eHealth

Y

N

Support for NSM

Y

Y

Support for third Party Managers

Y

N

Support for the UI Resource tab

Y

N

Support for the UI Policy tab

Y

Y

Data stored in Performance DB

Y

Y

File based configuration

Y

n/a

Manager UI-based configuration

Y

n/a

Hierarchical object model

Y

N

Agent-based threshold monitoring

Y

N

Support for Host Resource MIB

Y

N

Windows performance metrics

Partial 1

Y

Extensible performance monitoring

N

Y 2

Wide breadth UNIX or Linux monitoring

Y

Y

True average performance monitoring

Y

N

Support for vCenter Server management

Y (AIM)

N

Support for Hyper-V management

Y (AIM)

N

Support for Solaris Zones management

Y (AIM)

N

Support for LPAR monitoring

Y (AIM)

Y

Support for UCS management

Y (AIM)

N

Support for Exchange Server and Active Directory

Y (AIM)

N

Support for IBM High Availability Cluster Multiprocessing AIM

Y (AIM)

N

Support for VMware vCloud AIM

Y (AIM)

N

Support for Citrix XenServer AIM

Y (AIM)

N

Support for KVM AIM

Y (AIM)

N

(1) SystemEDGE provides support for a limited set of performance metrics. See SystemEDGE User Guide.

(2) CA Systems Performance LiteAgent has ability to monitor any Windows Performance Metrics dynamiPerformancecally.