Agentless monitoring for cloud VMs: Simplify scaling and observability

Managing cloud infrastructure is challenging enough without adding the burden of deploying and maintaining monitoring agents. What if there was a simpler, more efficient way to monitor your virtual machines (VMs)?

In the first part of this series, we looked at the [challenges of agent-based monitoring](link) and presented a better solution: agentless monitoring. 

Agentless monitoring is an efficient approach to observability that eliminates the need to install and manage software agents on each monitored device. Instead, it leverages existing communication protocols and APIs to collect performance data from your VMs and applications. This simplified method reduces the overhead of traditional agent-based solutions, making it particularly well-suited for dynamic cloud environments.

In the second part of this series, you’ll learn what agentless monitoring is all about and why it’s better for cloud-based VMs. You’ll also learn how to automate cloud VM monitoring to simplify operations and improve visibility.

Why agentless collection is better for cloud-based VMs

While agent-based monitoring works well in certain scenarios, like small-scale environments with a limited and predictable number of nodes, agentless monitoring is better at managing dynamic multi-cloud environments.

Automated resource discovery

With traditional agent-based approaches, teams must manually deploy and configure monitoring for each new resource. This becomes increasingly challenging as environments scale and change rapidly. In contrast, an automated approach continuously discovers and monitors new resources as your environment evolves.

This automated discovery provides several key advantages:

• Immediate visibility: New resources are automatically detected and monitored as soon as they’re provisioned, ensuring no blind spots in your infrastructure monitoring.
• Effortless scaling: As your environment grows through auto-scaling or manual additions, monitoring coverage automatically expands to match. There’s no need to modify monitoring configurations or deploy additional agents.
• Reduced manual effort: Your team no longer needs to track and monitor infrastructure changes manually. The platform automatically maintains an up-to-date inventory of all monitored resources.
• Improved accuracy: Automated discovery eliminates human error in resource detection and monitoring configuration, ensuring consistent and reliable monitoring coverage.

These capabilities are particularly valuable in dynamic cloud environments where resources can be created or removed frequently. For example, during an auto-scaling event, new VMs can be automatically discovered and monitored without any manual intervention. When those resources are later decommissioned, they’re automatically removed from monitoring—keeping your monitoring environment clean and current.

Such a solution can also enrich discovered resources with detailed information that helps teams better understand and manage their infrastructure. This automated enrichment enables better organization, more effective troubleshooting, and improved operational efficiency across your entire cloud environment.

Detailed monitoring information

Just because the monitoring setup isn’t built-in and manually configured with your cloud resources doesn’t mean you’ll miss out on the detailed data and insights that an agent-based monitoring setup can give you. Modern agentless monitoring integrates seamlessly with services inherent to the cloud provider to provide you with the monitoring information you need.

For example, LogicMonitor Envision (the comprehensive, AI-powered observability platform from LogicMonitor) integrates with Amazon CloudWatch, Azure Monitor, and Google Cloud Monitoring. These integrations allow you to gain a holistic view of your cloud environment, enabling you to correlate data from various sources and derive deeper insights into your operations.

With advanced features that help you proactively identify anomalies, predict future resource needs, and ensure the health and performance of your applications, LM Envision enables you to stay ahead of potential issues. Ultimately, observability platforms like LogicMonitor are extremely important in managing complex cloud environments effectively, driving better performance and reliability across applications.

No additional VM resources are consumed

Because agentless monitoring doesn’t require agents running on VMs, it doesn’t consume additional CPU and memory resources that could impact performance. This can be extremely helpful in resource-constrained environments where performance optimization is a priority.

By reducing the resource overhead, businesses not only improve performance but also achieve significant cost savings. With fewer resources tied up in monitoring processes, businesses can allocate their budgets more effectively—whether that means scaling operations, investing in new technologies, or simply reducing cloud costs.

Reduced potential security vulnerabilities

Agentless monitoring also reduces potential security vulnerabilities associated with third-party software installations (such as the agent itself) because it doesn’t deploy agents. For instance, in 2020, SolarWinds faced a major security breach that impacted over 30,000 private and public organizations through its partially agent-based monitoring platform Orion. By injecting malicious code into an Orion update/patch, attackers were able to push their malware to around 18,000 organizations as part of a supply chain attack and gain access to their system files.

Agent-based solutions introduce other security risks as well, including vulnerabilities inherent in the agent software itself and the ongoing need to manage agent updates and security patches. A compromised agent could expose sensitive system information and create a pathway for attackers to infiltrate the network.

With agentless monitoring, the monitoring process relies on built-in capabilities and existing cloud APIs, minimizing exposure to risks introduced by agent management and updates. By eliminating agents, agentless monitoring helps organizations reduce their attack surface significantly, contributing to a more proactive security posture.

Unified view across multiple cloud platforms

Agentless solutions also provide a unified view across multiple cloud platforms, enabling teams to monitor and manage security across hybrid environments. This helps identify misconfigurations and vulnerabilities across different cloud services without needing separate agents for each platform.

For example, LogicMonitor helped the John Holland Group cut their monitoring costs by up to 40 percent by consolidating four fragmented monitoring tools into one.

Wrapping up

Agentless monitoring eliminates the complexities of agent deployment, management, and maintenance, freeing your IT team from tedious tasks and reducing operational overhead. LM Envision’s agentless monitoring approach automatically discovers and monitors your cloud VMs while enriching them with detailed metadata, making it easier to organize and manage your infrastructure. This process simplifies scalability, reduces operational overhead, and provides real-time insights into your infrastructure.