I've started deploying agents as they really seem to work better than standard WMI monitoring - for example, one of my application monitors, for reasons that I can't explain, absolutely refused to get any data for one of the components. It was getting data for one of the components just fine, but the other was always in an 'unknown' state giving an error indicating something like 'no data to retrieve'. Enter the agents, I installed the agent on one of these 'trouble' machines and after I switched it to agent mode and gave it a little bit, both monitors showed up properly.
The problem is with the agents and reboots. Several of our servers that had agents deployed have been complaining that they needed a reboot to complete - well, all of the servers in our environment were patched and rebooted this weekend, and most, if not all of them, are STILL complaining that they need a reboot, despite the fact that they were about four days ago.
The need to reboot the servers for agent updates and/or installations, IMO, is bad. These servers are production servers, with processes going on 24/7 so we can't 'just reboot' them because the Solarwinds agent wants a reboot. At this point, it is probably going to be another month before they can be rebooted again.
As I said, I really don't know if this is because it needed one reboot to finish one thing, then another reboot to finish another, but that's not good.... it would be REALLY great if you could find a way for the agents to get updated and such without reboots. I was impressed/surprised when the initial install didn't require a reboot, but with this, not so much...