Managed Methods (www.managedmethods.com) introduced an agentless deployment option for gaining complete management visibility into SOA environments by passively sniffing on the network.

Generally, in order to enable performance reporting, fault management, usage metering and SLA management in their SOA environments, companies had to either install agents on the application servers or deploy intermediaries as proxies.

The agents become part of the handler chain in J2EE environments or .NET Extensions in .NET environments in order to access the message flow between the service consumers and providers. Where the management tool is deployed as an intermediary or a gateway, messages between clients and providers are brokered by the intermediary.