What is a benefit of polling devices with SolarWinds' Hybrid Cloud Observability (HCO) agent?

The SolarWinds Agent provides a robust alternative to agentless polling (SNMP/WMI), particularly in restricted environments. According to theSolarWinds Platform Agent requirements and port information, the primary architectural benefit is its communication security and firewall-friendly nature.

When using an agent, communication is consolidated. Instead of requiring a wide range of dynamic ports for RPC (as with WMI) or multiple ports for various SNMP checks, the agentcommunicates through a single fixed port(typically TCP 17778 for agent-initiated or 17790 for server-initiated communication). Furthermore, all traffic between the agent and the polling engine isencryptedusing 256-bit AES encryption. This makes agents the ideal choice for monitoring:

DMZ Servers: Where opening numerous ports back to the management network is a security violation.

Cloud Instances (AWS/Azure): Where data must travel over public or semi-public links and requires encryption in transit.

Remote Sites: Where NAT or strict firewall rules make traditional SNMP/WMI polling impossible.

Option B is incorrect because agents still report back to the Polling Engine (Orion Information Service), which then handles the database writes. Option C is incorrect as the agent actually increases the granularity of data collection, which may slightly increase database volume rather than reduce load.