Agent Management Overview

JetPatch Agent Manager enables you to centrally orchestrate the deployment and management of server tools (eg: Splunk, Evolven, InsightVM, etc) across a company's server infrastructure.

It can configure, monitor, and maintain the agents and their system resources, creating a single-pane-of glass between the OS and all of it's server applications. 

When an organization has many servers across diverse infrastructures, including physical, virtual, and cloud environments, often the machines need to be running various software management tools for purposes such as performance monitoring, security, and backup. JetPatch Agent Manager virtualizes these tools as managed agents, and centrally provisions, configures, controls and monitors them throughout an organization, automatically according to configurable policies or upon demand. For any server-to-endpoint management product, JetPatch Agent Manager not only provisions the agents to the endpoints but also registers them with their management server and configures server policy per-endpoint as needed.

Each software management tool that needs to run on endpoints is compressed into a single managed agent, in the form of a .vai (Virtual Agent Image) file - a JetPatch Agent Manager proprietary format that contains the agent payload along with additional configuration details and the JetPatch monitoring modules. Each .vai file is a full managed agent, containing the information for running a type of management tool in a container process. Managed agents are created by JetPatch professional services for each management tool type according to customer request; you can also develop your own managed agents. You then install the files on the organizational JetPatch Manager Console, from where you can centrally deploy them to endpoints and subsequently manage them.

Managed agents are isolated from the operating systems (in the case of VMs: from the VM guest operating systems) and contain their own virtual registry, file system, and other virtual resources. Managed agents do not cause any changes to existing DLLs, registry, or services.

JetPatch Agent Manager monitors resource consumption by each managed agent and throttles it according to the configured policy. JetPatch Agent Manager also maintains a watchdog mechanism for managed agents and for affected system services. You can customize additional agent health tests to be deployed along with the managed agents.

When JetPatch Agent Manager provisions a managed agent to an endpoint, if a legacy (non-managed) version of the agent is found running, JetPatch Agent Manager stops the legacy agent’s processes, leaving its files and registry settings intact. This enables seamless migration and POC testing.

JetPatch Agent Manager's failure will not interfere with the already-running managed agent.

Before you can deploy managed agents, for each managed agent you need to create one or more management services. A management service specifies the managed agent and includes a set of relevant configuration options.

JetPatch Agent Manager also provides an interface to endpoints for viewing actual managed agent files, including log files.

Below is a sample of agents we can manage (not a fully exhaustive list)