Agent-based collection techniques
As we mentioned previously, data sources could be collected and managed by an agent that's installed directly on the asset. This type of solution needs to be managed throughout the infrastructure, from deployment through patching and troubleshooting. Managing this type of solution is a challenge, but at the time of writing, a lot of large-scale solutions are used to deploy and maintain a package that can be used to fulfill this need. Also, some agent vendors have started taking this into account and some solutions are now implementing management features with the agent. This approach can also bring the benefit of reducing the bandwidth as we can easily apply filtering at the source, limit the resources that are needed at the end of the collection chain, and increase the security of the transmission by implementing secure protocols via the agent. In this section, we will present and review some of the agents that are available on the market. We...