The differences are: Agentless UID Agent does not support Nebios probing Agentless UID Agent requires less bandwidth for reading DC logs as only the required event IDs are transfered compared to the UID agent which reads the whole security log Agentless UID Agent has a max. of supported DCs for querying per HW platform and you need to keep in mind that too many DCs could have an impact on other functions like dynamic routing, logging and other processes that run on the management plane When you had these user-ip-mapping-update problem, it could have been related to the configured log reading frequency. I always configure this value to 1 second, because we also rely on fast updates in order to make some access possible. If you configure this value also to 1 second you should have the data pretty fast, as the agent sends updates to connected firewalls - the firewall does not have to poll the agent to receive the updates. In your highly distributed AD design you need do make sure that you connect to all DCs to always have the latest mappings and even more important to get the mapping as soon as possible after a user logs in. Because of that I would still try it with 2 agents that query all the DCs. This configuration should work and you have low-complexity-straight-forward config of the agents which you can distribute to all firewalls with a template and you do not need to configure various UID redistributions back and forth between your firewalls. As you don't absolutely trust the connections to the sites you could configure the site DCs on every branch firewall to continue to have updated ip-user mappings even when thw WAN connection goes down, but this one you probably don't need to redistribute to all other firewalls as it isn't that important to have this mapping when the connection is down anyway. Simply configure a timout of the mappings of about 4 or even more hours and it should be good (as long as the users are mostly static on one computer / IP). As I already wrote, panorama is an alternative, pretty good one actually in your case. You could use the agentless way and keep all firewalls in sync with the redistribution. Here I only assume that this way also works with pushed updates and nit polling, but I never tested it by myself. And if you require the redundandency as you mentionned, you also would need a HA panorama. If you already have that - go for it 😉
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