Important This documentation space contains information about PATROL Agents when deployed in a BMC Helix Operations Management environment. If you are a TrueSight Operations Management user, see PATROL Agent 23.3

Product overview

PATROL Agent is a framework for providing the interface to collect performance metrics for the monitored object at the scheduled intervals. BMC provides out of the box Knowledge Modules (KMs) for monitoring operating systems, virtualization infrastructure, business applications, databases, and hardware devices. 

PATROL Agent communicates with BMC Helix Operations Management using HTTP or HTTPS.

You can define the PATROL Agent communication mode during or after the installation of PATROL Agent using the integration variable:

http(s):< IP address or hostname of the load balancer>:<port number>

To configure this integration variable:

PATROL Agent provides the following benefits:

  • Offers hierarchical organization of monitored object data for intuitive visualization.
  • Provides the capability to both collect the data and evaluate the thresholds set on the metric calculated to trigger events on threshold breaches.
  • Maintains the history of information collected / events triggered which can be read on-demand for small-scale reporting infrastructure.
  • PATROL Agent is capable of reading in/ querying the SNMP v1 devices, thus third Party SNMP v1 data can be evaluated within PATROL Agent.
  • Monitors the data that can be plugged into any third party SNMP manager using smux protocol.
  • Enables the real-time streaming of performance data to BMC Helix Operations Management to generate dynamic base line and root cause analysis.

PATROL Agent components

This section lists and describes the components provided as part of PATROL and provides an overview of the products from other vendors that you can integrate with PATROL.

The core piece of the PATROL architecture that monitors and manages host computers. The PATROL Agent consists of Perform Agent executables (BDS_SDService.exe, which is registered as a service on Windows platforms, and bgscollect.exe ) and the PATROL Agent executable (patrolagent.exe ), which is registered as a service. The PATROL Agentperforms the following tasks:

  • Runs commands to collect system or application information; the information is collected according to applications and parameters defined in KMs
  • Acts as a service provider for event management

The following table lists all the components provided as part of PATROL:

Where to go from here

To understand the concepts used in the product, see Key-concepts.