Microsoft Releases a Monitoring Agent that Works With or Without Operations Manager

Microsoft has released a standalone tool that will monitor computer infrastructure and heath and collect performance metrics, events logs, and traces. This may sound a lot like the same functionality built into the System Center Operations Manager 2012 agent, because it is. The Microsoft Monitoring Agent combines the full functionality of the OpsMgr agent, .NET Application Performance Monitoring, and the IntelliTrace Standalone Collector and can be run as a standalone utility to identify problems.

However, the new agent will also work with OpsMgr. OpsMgr can pick up the retrieved information and make it available to the OpsMgr structure for infrastructure review.

You can get this new utility here: Microsoft Monitoring Agent 2013 Preview