Using proxy agents in Agent Client Collector

  • Release version: Australia
  • Updated March 12, 2026
  • 1 minute to read

    • You can use a proxy agent to monitor the health and performance of your configuration items (CIs) even if the agent is in the cloud or any place that is external to your host server.

    Proxy agents are used to monitor:
    • URLs (to ensure that the URLs are available and accessible)
    • Services that don't have a host server
    • Closed services on which you can’t configure an agent
    • External databases in the cloud
    One agent can monitor multiple entities and their CIs.
    The following diagram shows the connection between a ServiceNow instance, the MID Server, and Agent Client Collector agents, as well as proxy agents that monitor CIs that are external to the agent.
    Figure 1. Proxy agent configuration

    Proxy agent configuration diagram

    You can configure the proxy agent to do a custom check when it is monitoring external entities. To learn how to create custom checks, see Create and edit checks.

    You can create a cluster of proxy agents on multiple proxy servers to monitor the services that are external to the host server. To learn how to create a proxy agent cluster, see Create a proxy agent cluster.

    Use a Proxy Auto-Configuration (PAC) file to dynamically determine the appropriate proxy server to use. PAC files provide flexible and automated proxy configuration, enabling the agent to use different proxies for different destinations, connect directly to internal resources, implement complex proxy routing logic, and to automatically handle proxy failover. For details on the parameters used for PAC file configuration, see Configuration file options.

    Following is a sample PAC file:
    function FindProxyForURL (url, host) {

   // Connect directly to internal hosts
   if (isPlainHostName(host) ||
      shExpMatch(host, "*.internal.company.com")) {
      return "DIRECT";
   }

   // use proxy for all other hosts
   return "PROXY proxy.company.com:8080:
}