Striking a Proper Balance: Why Comprehensive API Security Requires Both Agentless and Agent-Based Data Collection

Engineers have long-devised various ways to collect reams of data from across their ever-expanding IT infrastructure operations. This treasure-trove of insights – buried deep within systems and software – helps IT operators improve such critical digital business requirements as network throughput, application performance, and increasingly API security.

Along a spectrum of data gathering options, agentless observability quickly analyzes data from network traffic to create a simple-but-general picture of events. Elsewhere on the spectrum, agents-based gathering methods have evolved and matured to listen for and record deeper and wider to ascertain more data-driven insights and analysis.

Agents-based gathering methods have evolved and matured to listen for and record deeper and wider to ascertain more data-driven insights and analysis.

A similar spectrum of observability choices and trade-offs is playing out in the application programming interface (API) security market. An assortment of security tools and platforms rely on a variety of agentless and/or agent-based detection and recording methods. On the one hand, agentless methods allow a quick and simple start. On the other hand, agent-based methods satisfy a growing roster of security requirements by deploying proven agents where appropriate to improve security analysis depth and ultimately reduce time to remediation.

Learn more about agent and agentless observability deployment options and why comprehensive API security requires both in this new white paper by Traceable AI.