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KACE K1000 Management Appliance Architecture

Distributed Management Agent

The management agent provides comprehensive out-of-band management capabilities by acting as a virtual administrator on each managed node. This provides for complete and effective management even if nodes are not connected to the network. The agent reduces administrative costs and user downtime by allowing all management functions to be executed remotely and unattended.

The agent is designed to keep deployment and maintenance costs low. A single, integrated agent supports all of the K1000 functionality, which speeds deployment. The agent uses minimal client processor cycles and memory, allowing the K1000 to inventory all clients regularly, typically several times a day, without a noticeable client performance hit. This regular visibility into inventory changes helps ensure accuracy in updates and reporting and ensures IT support are using valid data in resolving issues faster. The agent can also manage functions on a local node whether or not it has connectivity to the K1000. The ability for the agent to execute independently enables configuration management, security enforcement and vulnerability scanning for nodes even when they are not connected to the network.

Agent Messaging Protocol (AMP)

The ability to scale to tens of thousands of end-points while minimizing impact on the managed clients and network infrastructure is achieved using the K1000 Agent Messaging Protocol (AMP). This optimizes K1000 Appliance and agent communications and provides both predictability and control over the behavior and scaling of the overall solution.

AMP provides a unified messaging and control platform that is essential to any robust, scalable, central systems management appliance. It utilizes Internet protocols such HTTP and TCP/IP Sockets to provide reliable communication with the K1000 over any network topology or configuration.

When a system such as a laptop connects to the network, AMP allows it’s agent to initiate and establish an efficient, persistent connection to the K1000appliance. The persistent connection provides reliability and the near real time responsiveness needed to execute tasks or provide effective alerts and notifications.

Remote Site Support

With the increasing reality of multiple remote sites within growing organizations, the ability to provide end systems local access to management payloads (software packages, scripts, patches etc.) is critical. The solution must ensure remote users, and the network, are not impacted by long download times. The K1000 architecture addresses these remote site issues with payload staging by redistributing the management resources from the K1000 to existing file servers or network attached storage (NAS) at those remote sites using dynamic policies configured from the K1000. Copying of assets can be bandwidth throttled and supports checkpoint restart.

Any Windows, Mac or Linux system at that remote office can then pull applications, patches and scripts from that share versus the centralized K1000. This approach reduces the network resources required by the K1000 to deploy payloads and allows one K1000 to effectively manage large networks of up to 10,000 distributed nodes without adversely impacting an organization’s users or network.

Organizations and Permissions

The K1000 enables management domains to be easily set up aligned to an organization’s internal or geographical structures, controlling management access to groups of machines by defining “organizations” within the K1000. Functional access can then be controlled by user roles aligned to these organizations.