Microsoft Monitoring Agent monitors computer infrastructure and application health. It collects diagnostic data, such as performance metrics, event logs, and traces. Microsoft Monitoring Agent can be used as a standalone tool or together with System Center Operations Manager. When monitoring .NET applications, you can direct the agent to save application traces in an IntelliTrace log format that can be opened in Visual Studio Ultimate. When connected to System Center Operations Manager, the agent calculates the health state of the monitored computers and objects, and then reports back to the management server. The management servers centrally distribute the configuration to agents and store data received from the monitored computers.

Microsoft Monitoring Agent can be used as a standalone tool for collecting application traces locally. You can use PowerShell commands to start and stop monitoring and collect IntelliTrace logs from applications written in Microsoft .NET Framework.

Microsoft Monitoring Agent includes the full functionality of System Center Operations Manager Agent, .NET Application Performance Monitoring, and IntelliTrace Standalone Collector and can be used for monitoring applications that are running in production environments.