Monitoring and Surveillance Agents
Encyclopedia
Monitoring and surveillance agents (also known as predictive agents) are a type of intelligent agent
Intelligent agent
In artificial intelligence, an intelligent agent is an autonomous entity which observes through sensors and acts upon an environment using actuators and directs its activity towards achieving goals . Intelligent agents may also learn or use knowledge to achieve their goals...

 software that observes and reports on computer equipment. Monitoring and surveillance agents are often used to monitor complex computer networks to predict when a crash or some other defect may occur. Another type of monitoring and surveillance agent works on computer networks keeping track of the configuration of each computer connected to the network. It tracks and updates the central configuration database when anything on any computer changes, such as the number or type of disk drives. An important task in managing networks lies in prioritizing traffic and shaping bandwidth.

Examples

  • NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory
    Jet Propulsion Laboratory
    Jet Propulsion Laboratory is a federally funded research and development center and NASA field center located in the San Gabriel Valley area of Los Angeles County, California, United States. The facility is headquartered in the city of Pasadena on the border of La Cañada Flintridge and Pasadena...

     has an agent that monitors inventory, planning, and scheduling equipment ordering to keep costs down.

  • Allstate Insurance
    Allstate
    The Allstate Corporation is the second-largest personal lines insurer in the United States and the largest that is publicly held. The company also has personal lines insurance operations in Canada. Allstate was founded in 1931 as part of Sears, Roebuck and Co., and was spun off in 1993...

     has a network with thousands of computers. The company uses a network monitoring agent from Computer Associates International called Neugent that watches its huge networks 24 hours a day. Every five seconds, the agent measures 1200 data points and can predict a system crash 45 minutes before it happens.


Haag & Cummings & McCubbrey & Pinsonneault & Donovan (2006). Management Information Systems Third Canadian Ed. McGraw-Hill Ryerson

See also

  • Software agent
    Software agent
    In computer science, a software agent is a piece of software that acts for a user or other program in a relationship of agency, which derives from the Latin agere : an agreement to act on one's behalf...

  • Cfengine
    Cfengine
    CFEngine is a popular open source configuration managementsystem, written by Mark Burgess.Its primary function is to provide automated configuration and...

  • Nagios
    Nagios
    Nagios is a popular open source computer system and network monitoring software application. It watches hosts and services, alerting users when things go wrong and again when they get better....

  • PIKT
    PIKT
    PIKT is cross-categorical, multi-purpose software for global-view, site-at-a-time system and network administration. Applicability includes system monitoring, configuration management, server and network administration, system security, and many other uses....

  • Ganglia
    Ganglia (software)
    Ganglia is a scalable distributed system monitor tool for high-performance computing systems such as clusters and grids. It allows the user to remotely view live or historical statistics for all machines that are being monitored.-Ganglia:It is based on a hierarchical design targeted at...

     - an opensource distributed monitoring system for HPC clusters and grids
    Grid computing
    Grid computing is a term referring to the combination of computer resources from multiple administrative domains to reach a common goal. The grid can be thought of as a distributed system with non-interactive workloads that involve a large number of files...

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