Installing and Managing Agents Over Slow WAN Links (298360)

SUMMARY

You can manually install the Microsoft Operations Manager 2000 (MOM) agent to control bandwidth usage. An agent installer that is designed to be run at the prospective agent is available in the Manual Agent Installation folder on the MOM CD-ROM. This method reduces the bandwidth that is used by Agent Manager to send the necessary files to a prospective agent. Additionally, this method is designed to address firewall concerns.

MORE INFORMATION

When you use this method, you should review the following settings:

Review the need for heartbeat and service availability reporting. These settings are configurable globally by clicking Configuration, clicking Global Settings, and then viewing the agent properties, or individually (per agent), by clicking Configuration, clicking Agent Manager, and then clicking the Managed Computers tab. To configure an individual agent, click the computer name, and then click Settings.
Consider increasing the buffering time slightly. Adjusting this value increases the communication failure retry times, and simultaneously reduces the number of retry attempts. You can configure these settings in the agent properties, as described above.
Make configuration and rule changes in batches. All such changes are pushed out dynamically, at the next heartbeat interval. If you make changes only once a day, for example, new configurations go out only once a day to all agents.
Consider disabling the default event collection rules. Disabling the event collection rules means that only events that match rules are collected, not every event that is generated by the operating system or software. Expand the Rules, Processing Rule Groups, and Default Event Collection for Windows NT and 2000 items, and then click to clear the Enabled check box.
Run the Most Common Events report and look for events that you may not need to collect.

To install the Manual agent, run Setup.exe in the Manual Agent Installation folder on the MOM CD-ROM. Follow the Setup instructions to specify the correct configuration group in which you want the computer and agent to be located, the consolidator that you want it to contact, and what level of control you want to allow.