How many agents are in System Center 2012? (So many questions. So little time. Part 12.)

Tighe asked this question at our TechNet Event in Saint Louis several weeks ago:

“System Center 2012 - one agent for all products?”

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That’s a great question, Tighe.  Naturally one might assume that if we’ve changed-up how we sell System Center 2012 now as one product rather than a suite of separate products, that we might consider using only one management agent on the servers and desktops that are under management.  I don’t know if that has been considered, personally, but I suspect that it wasn’t considered for very long. And here’s why:

Even though we’re going to be selling SC2012 as one product (in two varieties: Regular and Extra-Strength), you will still have the choice to implement one or two or 5 of the 8 components you own.  If I just want to do desktop and server (and service and network and…) monitoring using System Center 2012 Operations Manager, but don’t care about doing deployment or updates using System Center 2012 Configuration Manager, then I certainly don’t care to have the additional functionality (and potential overhead) installed on the desktops I’m monitoring. 

It’s because of this that I doubt Microsoft would create just one agent.  But I could be wrong.  I’m not on the product team.  Perhaps they could do something to somehow simplify and unify agent deployments, but that’s pure speculation (wishful thinking) on my part.

“Okay smart guy… So, how many agents are in System Center 2012 then, if you were to install all of the components?”

Here are the components that utilize an agent (sometimes optional) for working with other machines:

Here are the ones that, unless I’m mistaken, don’t have any use for any deployed agents:

“Um.. wait.. ‘Regular and Extra-Strength’ System Center 2012?!”

Okay.. not really.  By “Regular” I mean “Standard”, and by “Extra-Strength” I mean “Datacenter”.  Read my blog post on the new System Center 2012 licensing model.

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