Tell Me Where It Hurts IT Endpoint
Written by Dr Al Hartmann and presented by Ziften CEO Charles Leaver
Wouldn’t you love it if your IT client endpoints could just tell you when they are sick rather than field unpleasant calls from unhappy IT users? But IT clients are generally not capable of telling you when something is wrong. Despite all kinds of interesting (and often emotional) IT arguments against an agent to provide situational awareness, that’s what you are going to need on your endpoints. Here’s why this is OK with the Ziften solution:
Ziften deploys a minimalist driverless agent. Unlike typical security or systems management agents, the Ziften agent is extremely lightweight (approximately 1-2MB MSI package.) It provides the efficiency and performance management headroom to get more work done on enterprise endpoints, keeping users happy and productive. The Ziften agent is like the light beer slogan, “Great taste, less filling.”
In addition, the Ziften agent monitors and reports on other deployed agents that excessively interfere with user foreground tasks.
The Ziften agent offers benefits that an agentless approach cannot match. It can:
Respond in real-time to dynamic events on the endpoint. Approaches without an agent require periodic polling, so events on the endpoint are reported in a cadence after they have occurred – not in real -time.
Adaptively throttle interfering processes. For example, if a backup program is interfering with user productivity excessively, slow down the backup program in favor of user productivity.
Alert on critical service failures such as AV, firewall, systems management, and backup. While an agentless approach could do this, it would not be real-time, reducing its effectiveness.
Alert on serious security events detected at the client endpoint, again, in real-time.
Recognize user presence and activity. With the agent, Ziften is able to detect user presence by watching last mouse/keyboard use. It also uses the window proxy to determine which window is foreground and which are in background. With this information, the Ziften agent can determine application licenses actually being used across the enterprise.
Without an agent, when the endpoint is off the network it is not possible to monitor and control while disconnected. The Ziften agent is able to monitor off-network endpoints and report cached observations when the endpoint reconnects. This eliminates off-network blind spots in monitoring coverage. In addition, the Ziften agent is able to enforce policy even while disconnected.
The Ziften agent is able to minimize network traffic load between client endpoints and the management server by filtering, abstracting, summarizing and encoding time series observations.
So, your endpoint clients can “tell you where it hurts” with the Ziften agent.
Wouldn’t you love it if your IT client endpoints could just tell you when they are sick rather than field unpleasant calls from unhappy IT users? But IT clients are generally not capable of telling you when something is wrong. Despite all kinds of interesting (and often emotional) IT arguments against an agent to provide situational awareness, that’s what you are going to need on your endpoints. Here’s why this is OK with the Ziften solution:
Ziften deploys a minimalist driverless agent. Unlike typical security or systems management agents, the Ziften agent is extremely lightweight (approximately 1-2MB MSI package.) It provides the efficiency and performance management headroom to get more work done on enterprise endpoints, keeping users happy and productive. The Ziften agent is like the light beer slogan, “Great taste, less filling.”
In addition, the Ziften agent monitors and reports on other deployed agents that excessively interfere with user foreground tasks.
The Ziften agent offers benefits that an agentless approach cannot match. It can:
Respond in real-time to dynamic events on the endpoint. Approaches without an agent require periodic polling, so events on the endpoint are reported in a cadence after they have occurred – not in real -time.
Adaptively throttle interfering processes. For example, if a backup program is interfering with user productivity excessively, slow down the backup program in favor of user productivity.
Alert on critical service failures such as AV, firewall, systems management, and backup. While an agentless approach could do this, it would not be real-time, reducing its effectiveness.
Alert on serious security events detected at the client endpoint, again, in real-time.
Recognize user presence and activity. With the agent, Ziften is able to detect user presence by watching last mouse/keyboard use. It also uses the window proxy to determine which window is foreground and which are in background. With this information, the Ziften agent can determine application licenses actually being used across the enterprise.
Without an agent, when the endpoint is off the network it is not possible to monitor and control while disconnected. The Ziften agent is able to monitor off-network endpoints and report cached observations when the endpoint reconnects. This eliminates off-network blind spots in monitoring coverage. In addition, the Ziften agent is able to enforce policy even while disconnected.
The Ziften agent is able to minimize network traffic load between client endpoints and the management server by filtering, abstracting, summarizing and encoding time series observations.
So, your endpoint clients can “tell you where it hurts” with the Ziften agent.