Comparison of Agentless and Agent Based Discovery Tools
Comparison of the Discovery functions within xAssets IT Asset Management
to Agent Based and Agentless Products
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Installed Agents
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No Agents Installed
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Agents are Installed and Constantly Use Network Bandwidth and Local CPU
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No Agents Installed
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Ability to Access the Windows API and Local Resources for detailed discovery
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Yes, Full Access
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Yes, Full Access
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No Access
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Loading on End User CPU
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Typically under 4 seconds CPU used per discovery - 0.004% of CPU and about 200KBytes of network bandwidth per PC.
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Light but many agents are still problematic with agent task CPU delaying end users
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Heavy Load on CPU due to inefficient WMI and RPC loading, and heavier load on bandwidth because requests cannot be compressed and data returned cannot be compressed.
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Loading on Corporate Network
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About 200KBytes of network bandwidth per PC per discovery.
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Typically 100KB to 1MB per discovery depending on Vendor.
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Heavy Load on network bandwidth because requests cannot be compressed and data returned cannot be compressed.
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Ability to Discover Hidden Executables
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Yes
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Yes
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No
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Ability to Monitor Software Usage
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Yes, in the next version
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Yes, some vendors can monitor software usage
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Not possible
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Ability to Discover the Entire Machine
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Yes
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Yes, usually
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Not possible
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Able to function with Windows Firewall Enabled
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Yes. We provide three alternative technologies to allow discovery through Windows Firewall.
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Yes, but the agent has to be deployed manually.
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Not possible
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xAssets Network Discovery does not deploy agents across your entire network,
and yet it achieves the same business objectives as most agent based discovery tools.
In 2024 we have added a discovery agent to allow customers with work-from-home assets to discover and manage these assets on demand.