No Endpoint Agents Required: How Plixer One Delivers Scalable Visibility

Endpoint agents have long been treated as a necessary trade-off. They offer local insight, but they also add risk: extra software to deploy, maintain, and troubleshoot. For security and network teams already managing thousands of endpoints across hybrid environments, the overhead can be staggering.

Plixer takes a different approach. By reusing flow telemetry that already exists in your infrastructure and adding lightweight probes only where needed, the Plixer One platform provides complete visibility and forensic depth without ever touching an endpoint.

The result is faster investigations, fewer escalations, and zero friction for users or IT.

The problem with traditional endpoint agents

Most security and performance tools still depend on endpoint agents to collect behavioral data. These agents monitor process activity, DNS queries, or network connections, then forward that information to a central console.

But the operational burden grows quickly:

• Every new operating system or patch cycle requires testing and validation
• Updates must be packaged, pushed, and verified across thousands of devices
• Performance or compatibility issues can cause user complaints or downtime
• In regulated environments, every agent raises new privacy and compliance concerns

What happens next? Teams spend more time maintaining agents than analyzing data. And as endpoints move beyond corporate networks—remote workers, mobile devices, IoT—the task of maintaining consistent coverage becomes nearly impossible.

How Plixer sees the network differently

Instead of installing anything on endpoints, Plixer One leverages the flow telemetry already exported by your routers, switches, and firewalls.

This telemetry contains rich metadata: who talked to whom, over what protocol, for how long, and how much data was transferred. When combined with FlowPro probes and Endpoint Analytics, it becomes a complete, continuous record of network behavior.

Plixer’s approach delivers the visibility depth that traditional agent-based systems promise, but without the maintenance overhead or performance impact.

In practice, this means:

• No software rollouts or version conflicts
• No risk of endpoint instability
• No administrative rights required on user devices
• No compliance exceptions for regulated systems

The role of FlowPro and Endpoint Analytics

FlowPro extends existing flow data with additional context where needed. Deployed as virtual or hardware probes, it adds application awareness, DNS visibility, and performance metrics at packet-level depth.

For environments that demand endpoint-level context, our Endpoint Analytics feature uses passive observation (i.e., watching traffic patterns at aggregation points) to infer details about device identity, behavior, and communication patterns. It builds a picture of endpoint activity without ever installing software on the device itself.

Together, these capabilities deliver a complete view of the environment:

1. Collect existing flow and metadata from routers, firewalls, and probes
2. Analyze the data for anomalies, performance issues, or threats
3. Respond with evidence-rich timelines or tickets
4. Optimize by reusing this data to forecast or validate future changes

That architecture powers both operational efficiency and security assurance across the same unified dataset.

Comparing agent-based and agentless approaches

Traditional agent-based tools require software to be installed and maintained on every endpoint. Each installation introduces new dependencies: different OS versions, update cycles, and potential conflicts with other applications. These agents collect valuable data, but they also consume CPU, memory, and bandwidth, often at the expense of user experience.

Plixer’s agentless approach works differently. Because there’s no software to deploy on endpoints, there are no agent updates, version mismatches, or support tickets tied to endpoint performance.

Coverage is another key difference. Agent-based tools can only see managed devices. Plixer’s agentless telemetry covers everything communicating on the network: servers, IoT, unmanaged assets, even rogue devices.

And from a compliance standpoint, agentless data collection is inherently cleaner. Since nothing is installed on user systems, there’s no additional data exposure, new audit controls, or privacy hurdles to clear.

This results in a visibility model that’s highly scalable.

Security validation through network evidence

Every investigation ultimately comes down to one question: what really happened?

Plixer One provides that answer with defensible, independent network evidence. Whether it’s validating an EDR alert, confirming lateral movement, or explaining an outage, analysts can follow the same set of flow records to reconstruct the event.

Because those records are independent of endpoint logs or agent data, they serve as an objective source of truth that every team can trust.

Typical evidence includes:

• A ticket or case bundle containing the flow timeline and affected entities
• A shareable report summarizing root cause and corrective action
• A Forecast export or before/after view demonstrating service recovery

These create confidence across departments and provide clear audit trails for leadership or regulators.

Why this approach fits modern environments

Hybrid work, cloud adoption, and IoT have permanently changed the perimeter. Traditional endpoint agents were never designed for that level of diversity. Maintaining coverage across multiple operating systems, unmanaged devices, and segmented networks is costly and unreliable.

Plixer’s agentless architecture was built for this reality. By focusing on the conversations between systems instead of the systems themselves, it delivers consistent insight across any topology. Whether traffic is on-prem, in the cloud, or traversing remote VPNs, flow replication and analysis continue uninterrupted.

This approach is durable. When the network changes, Plixer doesn’t need to be redeployed. It simply keeps observing.

Explore agentless network visibility

Every unnecessary agent adds noise and risk. Plixer’s agentless model gives security and operations teams the depth they need and the simplicity they want.

By reusing the telemetry you already collect, you can confirm alerts faster, plan capacity more confidently, and maintain compliance without compromise.

Ready to check it out? Book a demo with one of our engineers today.