You will have to excuse me a SCOM really isn't my area but my manager asked me to look into Agent vs. Agentless monitoring of Desktop PC's. We already have SCOM in place for servers but there are several desktops that are around and more coming that we want to monitor (approx. 50 total PC's). Management is currently leaning towards agentless since we are licensed for MDOP and the licensing fee is included in that. This does not seem like the best way to go but now I need to convince them of that. What I am looking for is a basic rundown of features and if they are available with agent or agentless, Pro, Cons...stuff like that. I have already read several articles stating that agentless does increase network traffic. http://cameronfuller.spaces.live.com/Blog/cns!A231E4EB0417CB76!1044.entry I also came across another web site stating that there are limits of how many agentless clients you can have per server and that it requires local admin access to run... "Agentless monitoring is very resource intensive on the Mgmt Server (only 10 agentless per mgmt server, 60 per mgmt group). And it does require local admin access. You could try configuring an Action Account for that system that is a local administrator to see if that works." Source: http://www.systemcentercentral.com/Forums/tabid/60/indexid/42043/Default.aspx Is this True? Thanks in advance! Brian

You can go well beyond 50 - that's a small #. The main difference is what can be monitored - for instance, only some types of monitors can be used remotely - such as perf counter or event based rules - and at this point, these are really only interesting for collection. Monitoring client PC's is tricky - you probably don't want to alert on anything at all - since if a program is hung, the user knows to just restart it. Collecting statistics, crash stats, security logs - via either the AEM or ACS features in OM are more conventional - and AEM is agentless, and ACS scales best agentlessly. But your #'s are tiny, recommend you try it out and see your own results. Microsoft Corporation

This limitations you quoted above are true. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb309428.aspx Keep in mind that these are not hard limits, and will depend on what is being monitored on the agentless-managed computer, as Dan mentioned.HTH, Jonathan Almquist - MSFT

Hi Given the numbers you are talking about, have you considered that you should be using SCE 2010? http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/en/us/essentials.aspx A sort of OpsMgr meets patch management from SCCM meets VMM. Just a thought. Cheers Graham View OpsMgr tips and tricks at http://systemcentersolutions.wordpress.com/