Agents
IBM® Flex System Manager management software provides a central point of control for aggregating and managing discovered systems based on a service-oriented architecture. The management software includes two operating-system agents: Common Agent and Platform Agent.
The operating-system agents serve as the control point for accessing operating system and host information that might not be accessible through an out-of-band interface. These agents run on operating-system-based and hardware-based endpoints, called systems, that can be discovered and managed by the management software. The level of system management depends on the agent that is installed on the system: Common Agent or Platform Agent. Each agent provides a different footprint size, level of performance, and set of management functions.
The management software can discover and manage some systems on which neither of these operating-system agents is installed, but the level of management is limited.
For Platform Agent, a web-connected management node installs and updates agents automatically. For Common Agent, the installation and update processes are always manual; you must download, import, and install them manually. For more information about installing and managing agents, see Installing and managing agents.