1.2. Before You Begin

This chapter contains high level information which will help you plan and implement the ASGARD Management Center within your existing environment.

Hint

Within this manual we might call the ASGARD Management Center just ASGARD or Management Center for the sake of simplicity.

1.2.1. Agent to ASGARD Communication

There are a few things to consider before you start with the installation. The communication between ASGARD and the ASGARD agent is unidirectional. The ASGARD agent polls the in a given time frame and ask for tasks to execute. There is no active triggering from ASGARD to the ASGARD agent – we have designed it that way, because we believe that opening a port on all connected endpoints should and can be avoided.

1.2.2. Performance Considerations

In environments with up to 500 endpoints, the default polling interval is around 20 seconds. In larger environments the polling interval increases automatically up to one minute for 2.000 endpoints and 10 minutes for configurations with 25.000 endpoints connected to a single ASGARD.

For this reason larger environments are not as responsive as small environments when it comes to opening remote shells or executing urgent response tasks. It may take up to 10 minutes for the shell to open or results of a THOR scan to show up. Once a task is running, like the remote console for example, the connection becomes almost instant.

Most environments contain endpoints which need faster polling between the agent and your ASGARD Management Center. For this reason we implemented a Fast Poll mode which can be set individually on a per host basis. For more information, please see Asset Overview.

1.2.3. Using a Proxy between ASGARD Agent and ASGARD

ASGARD supports using a standard http proxy for the entire Agent to ASGARD communication. In order to use a proxy, the ASGARD agent must be repacked after installation. For details, see Creating Custom Agent Installer.