Abstract: The Internet is a global network connecting millions of computers. The Industries based on network and information sharing is wide spread across the world having major control on the economic sector of the world. Networking and distributed computing plays the key role for the survival of IT industries. The downtime in these sectors caused by the failure in the distributed networks is handled by various techniques. Network management agents have existed for years; System agents are one such software agents whose main job is to manage the operations of a data communications network. These agents monitor for device failures or system overloads and redirects work to other parts in order to maintain a level of performance and reliability. This paper surveys various agent techniques that reduce down time caused by system failure and states the effects of the system down time and the use of system agent in the field of distributed computing is analysed.

Keywords: Distributed computing, downtime in IT, fault tolerant agents, system agents.