Linux Agent Crontab Restart Always

We recently started deploying the SolarWinds Linux agent to all of our servers. I noticed with the install that a cron job is created.

Running crontab -e shows the following job for the swiagentd service:

* * * * * /bin/sh /etc/init.d/swiagentd swrestart > /dev/null 2&>1

Is it necessary for this to run so often?

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Accepted answers

aLTeReGo

The Linux Agent is not actually being restarted. This cron job serves solely as a watchdog to start the Linux agent if for any reason it's found not to be running.

All comments

roger_that

dlepi, Restarting the swiagentd every minute does sound excessive, unless there has been a problem discovered/observed wherein the swiagentd is getting killed frequently. More information is definitely needed.

dlepi

We haven't seen any issues with it restarting so often. I guess I'm just more curious why this is the default. Is it a workaround for a known issue?

In the past we used to restart the Agent on our Windows nodes every 30 minutes during our Chef Client runs as a workaround for an issue. We found that the Windows Agent service would show as running, but data wouldn't stop updating. One example, I happened to open one of our SQL nodes in the console and found CPU and other stats were missing. I restarted the Agent to get it working again, and suddenly we were getting alerts that disk space was full on one of the drives. The node was reporting up before the Agent restart (green light and all), but we had no indication of its status unless we happened to click into the node to view details. The Windows Agent seems stable now since updating to NPM 12, but I'm wondering if we should play it safe again and restart the Windows Agent periodically if the Linux agent is restarting every minute by default.

aLTeReGo

The Linux Agent is not actually being restarted. This cron job serves solely as a watchdog to start the Linux agent if for any reason it's found not to be running.

dlepi

OK, I think I'm seeing that not now. Thanks!