Hostadagent

Hostadagent is a lightweight software daemon designed to run on individual hosts in a managed IT environment to advertise host identity, capabilities, and health status to a central management platform. It focuses on asset discovery, telemetry collection, and policy-driven action.

The agent collects hardware and software inventory, OS details, running processes, installed updates, and resource utilization. It periodically sends this data to the management server, along with a heartbeat signal and event notifications. It supports pluggable collectors and is able to report custom attributes or role assignments to support dynamic workload placement.

Communication is secured via transport encryption and mutual authentication. Data can be sent over RESTful APIs or a message bus, and the agent supports offline operation with local queuing and batching when connectivity is restored.

Architecture and deployment: the hostadagent runs as a system service (for example, as a systemd unit on Linux or a Windows service) and can be managed via standard configuration management tools. It is designed to be cross-platform and lightweight, with configurable polling intervals and data transmission policies.

Security and compliance: access to the management platform is authenticated and authorized; data is minimized according to policy; logs and audit trails are maintained for troubleshooting and compliance.

Use cases: IT asset management, capacity planning, software deployment and patching, compliance auditing, and automated remediation workflows that target specific host attributes.