Introduction to Auditing Agents

Auditing agents in the Enterprise Server solution are applications or utilities that collect information about the IT Assets in your organization. Once that information has been collected it can be posted directly to your ENT Server, saved to a file or emailed to someone to be handled at a later date.

These auditing agents can be divided into two basic categories:

1.

Machine auditing agents - used to collect information about individual machines

2.

Network auditing agents – used to find and audit machines on a network

The three main auditing agents for Enterprise Server are

1.

ENT Network Monitor

2.

ENT NetCenter

3.

EntAudit.exe.

The first two (ENT Network Monitor and ENT NetCenter) are both examples of network auditing agents and can be used to scan entire networks for new, existing or missing machines, audit these machines as required and post the results back to your Enterprise Server where it is immediately available in your IT Asset repository for technicians and managers.

The last of the three auditing agents (EntAudit.exe) is a Machine audit agent – this is a utility that can be run from the command line on individual machines and will either save the results of the audit to a specified location on the file system or email these to an email address that you configure.

Each of the three different auditing agents has specific advantages in different situations, so it's a good idea to understand the principles of each as well as how to install and configure each of these, so that you can pick the best tool for the job. More often than not, you will use a combination of these tools, rather than any one in particular.