A SAM represents a server that is being monitored.
Clicking on a SAM in the Surveillance tree provides access to entities (connections to databases, etc.) and product-related options.
The Session Agent Manager (SAM) is the heart of Surveillance Server. It sits between the client and server agents, directing traffic and delivering messages. The SAM determines which agent should perform work requested from the client. It provides security and permissions functionality, such as SAM user accounts to log into Surveillance, and role-based access control (RBAC) and fine-grained permissions to filter views or data based on the audience.
A SAM automatically starts most agents, which run continuously, but it may start and stop some agents on demand. The SAM process is called dbgsam (UNIX and Linux) or dbgsamnt.exe (Windows). Most agents have names that begin with "dbg" or "nsm".
The SAM provides the listener on certain network interfaces and ports, waiting for logins from client users or other SAMs. Each connection creates a virtual session (vsession), and these are multiplexed over physical sessions (psessions). For example, SAM A can open a physical session to SAM B, and then multiple virtual sessions can flow over this physical session. Most of this session management happens automatically; when you log into the CAS and browse to a SAT, the two SAMs handle all of the details to provide a seamless browsing experience.
By default, a SAM name is the hostname of the server. However, SAM names cannot contain hyphens, and these will get converted to underscores during installation.