Definition
An agent is software installed on every machine to report its state. Without an agent, the inventory comes from the cloud APIs and the content of disks from a snapshot mounted elsewhere. The advantage: deployment in hours, no software to maintain on hosts, no load on production.
In Ctadel
The six clouds are read through their APIs. For disks and databases, a temporary copy is created inside your account, read on an ephemeral instance, then destroyed. Agentless does not mean read-only: those copies require create and delete permissions, requested separately, which you may refuse.