The AimBetter Agent is a lightweight program designed to provide deep insights into database and server performance for enterprise IT environments. Installed on a single Windows server within a company’s domain, it enables remote data collection across multiple servers, platforms, and databases.
The AimBetter Agent’s primary function is to gather detailed metadata and performance metrics without directly accessing or storing sensitive data, making it secure and minimally invasive.
What makes the AimBetter Agent unique?
Being the core of the AimBetter system, we constantly work on improving its capabilities and user-friendliness. Let’s explain these capabilities in more detail.
Remote Monitoring
The Agent can be installed on a single server within the company’s domain, and other network servers can be monitored remotely. This central installation gathers performance data from multiple servers and sends it to the AimBetter console, where it is displayed and analyzed.
This capability eliminates the need to install monitoring software on each server, reducing deployment time and maintenance efforts. IT teams can achieve comprehensive monitoring with a smaller footprint and fewer resources, making it easier to scale monitoring capabilities across large infrastructures without burdening each server with additional software.
Flexible Server Configuration
The AimBetter Agent is capable of monitoring multiple servers from a single installation. With its floating license model, organizations can reassign monitoring capabilities to different servers on demand, allowing the Agent to focus on specific servers or services as needed.
This flexibility offers cost savings by reducing the need for multiple licenses while allowing IT teams to adapt monitoring resources in real time based on operational priorities. If a particular server becomes a performance hotspot, the Agent can quickly be reconfigured to monitor that server more intensively, helping IT teams allocate resources effectively.
Cross-Platform Support
The AimBetter Agent is designed to support a wide range of environments, both on-premise and in the cloud. It can operate on Windows and Linux systems and is compatible with cloud platforms like Microsoft Azure and Amazon RDS. This flexibility extends to database servers, such as SQL Server and Oracle, as well as web servers like IIS.
This versatility allows organizations to use AimBetter across a variety of setups without needing different monitoring tools for different environments. This unified approach not only reduces overhead costs but also simplifies training and management since teams can rely on a single solution regardless of the underlying infrastructure.
Data Encryption
The AimBetter Agent encrypts all collected data before it is transmitted to the AimBetter API. This encryption ensures that data remains protected during transmission over potentially vulnerable network pathways, preserving the integrity and confidentiality of the information.
By encrypting data in transit, AimBetter provides a strong layer of protection against unauthorized interception, which is crucial for organizations handling sensitive or regulated data. This feature helps companies meet compliance requirements for data protection, making the AimBetter Agent suitable for use in environments with stringent security policies.
Minimal Permission Requirement
The AimBetter Agent is designed to operate with the least amount of privileges necessary to collect performance data, meaning it can function under a user profile with minimal permissions. It accesses only metadata—data about the structure and state of the database—without touching sensitive or user-generated content within the database. This limitation ensures that the Agent cannot perform any actions like insert, update, or delete, nor can it change user credentials or make alterations to the database itself.
By operating with minimal permissions, the AimBetter Agent greatly reduces security risks, making it suitable for highly regulated environments that prioritize data privacy and compliance. Since the Agent only accesses metadata, organizations can trust that their sensitive business data remains secure. This design also ensures compliance with regulatory standards by preventing unauthorized access to protected information, aligning with data governance and privacy policies such as GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI-DSS.
Secure Connection for Sensitive Data
For SQL Server environments, AimBetter recognizes that some execution plans might contain sample data, which users may not be aware of. The Agent includes a “secure connection” option that enables users to exclude sample data when retrieving these plans, protecting potentially sensitive information from unintentional exposure.
This feature offers an extra layer of security, addressing an often-overlooked privacy risk in SQL Server environments. By providing the option to omit sample data from execution plans, AimBetter helps companies safeguard against accidental data leakage while still benefiting from the insights of execution plans.
Configurable Connection Persistence
AimBetter’s Agent can operate in two modes regarding database connections: by default, it opens and closes connections as needed, but it also offers an option to maintain a persistent connection. This is particularly useful when the database is under heavy load and may struggle to handle additional connection requests.
The ability to keep a persistent connection is a significant benefit for overloaded databases. During high-traffic periods, maintaining a connection means AimBetter can continue collecting performance data even when new connections may not be possible. This persistent monitoring helps IT teams maintain visibility and gain insight into the causes of overloads, ultimately assisting in quicker recovery and issue resolution.
Selective Activation for Responsive Agent Capabilities
The AimBetter Agent includes an option to enable or disable Responsive Agent capabilities, allowing customers to decide whether they want to perform actions directly from the AimBetter console. This feature can be activated as needed within the AimBetter Agent settings.
This selective activation ensures that only customers who require and opt for these direct-action capabilities have access to them, providing an added layer of control and customization. Organizations that want to limit remote actions for security or compliance reasons can keep this feature disabled, while those that need hands-on management flexibility can enable it. This user-defined control allows for a tailored approach, adapting AimBetter’s functionality to match the customer’s operational policies and security preferences.
Module Control
AimBetter allows users to activate or deactivate specific modules in the Agent, enabling them to tailor the monitoring setup to their specific needs. For example, certain modules might be deactivated if they are not required, or if resource conservation is a priority.
This customization helps organizations optimize both resource usage and monitoring focus. By only enabling the modules necessary for current operational needs, AimBetter users can reduce overhead and focus system resources on the areas that matter most, whether that’s database performance, system security, or application monitoring.
Parameter Hiding for Sensitive Data in Web Server Monitoring
For customers who use AimBetter to monitor web servers, there is an option to hide specific parameters that may contain sensitive data, such as passwords or other confidential information. This feature allows the user to mask these parameters within the monitoring console, ensuring they remain private.
By hiding sensitive parameters, AimBetter provides an additional layer of data protection essential for customers handling confidential information on their web servers. This feature helps organizations adhere to data privacy and security policies by preventing sensitive data exposure within the monitoring tool. It allows for the full use of monitoring capabilities while maintaining data confidentiality and mitigating the risk of unintentional data leaks.
Continuous Connectivity Check
The AimBetter Agent verifies internet connectivity by sending a ping every 5 seconds to a designated URL, with google.com set as the default. Customers can customize this URL through the AimBetter Agent configuration program.
This feature ensures constant awareness of network stability and response times, helping IT teams quickly identify connectivity issues that might affect performance. Allowing customers to select a preferred URL provides flexibility to adapt to specific network configurations or reliability benchmarks, enhancing responsiveness to connectivity-related challenges.
