How to upgrade Agents without the need of rebooting and maintain polling

Hi,

We have a 24/7 operations and only rebooting production servers after schedule patching period by batch. All our servers are already rebooted after the patching.

We are planning to upgrade Solarwinds from 12.2 to 12.5 2019.2 HF3. (2019.4 is not an option for now)

In my previous experience, when you upgrade sw agents, it will still ask servers to be rebooted after the agent upgrade or some will change to reboot pending randomly. This also cause monitoring to stop until server has been rebooted which will be a nightmare if that happens this upcoming upgrade.

How can we prevent and continue polling after upgrade or ensure that this will not happen and continue to monitor after the upgrading the agents without the reboot?

It is critical for us the maintain monitoring after the downtime and we cannot restart the production servers just for the sake of monitoring agent upgrade.

I saw something here on thwack that we can use a command to manually change the status of the agent but i am not sure if this will apply also to polling or just a status change but polling still not working:

UPDATE [dbo].[AgentManagement_Agents]

SET [AgentStatus] = 1

,[AgentStatusMessage] = 'Agent is running'

,[AgentStatusData] = NULL

,[AgentStatusTimeStampUtc] = GETUTCDATE()

WHERE AgentStatus = 5

Source: SAM Agents & Reboots

Thanks in advance!

jblankjblank , aLTeReGo cobrien

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aLTeReGo

The Agent should not require a reboot unless one of its key dependencies are updated. Note however that if the Agent is upgraded on a machine where Windows Updates have been applied, but the machine hasn't yet been rebooted, this may cause the Agent to not function properly until the machine has been rebooted. If necessary you can disable updating those specific Agents, which will force them into a compatibility mode whereby most, if not all, polling should continue to function normally. Once those machines have been rebooted, you can then re-enable automatic upgrading of those agents.

Note in compatibility mode, you will obviously not be able to utilize any new features of the Agent in the later release, and some things may not function at all, like 'List Resources'.

mat12

Hi aLTeReGo ,

Thank you for the explanation.

Unfortunately, some of our agents stay at reboot pending even after rebooting the server.

That is why sometimes, we restart the agent service multiple times to get rid of those.

Sometimes if the status not updating, we keep it as is as we cannot reboot again after a few weeks.

So i am curious if this command from thwack can help us resolve those agents not changing its status to up or connected:

‐------‐------------------------

UPDATE [dbo].[AgentManagement_Agents]

SET [AgentStatus] = 1

,[AgentStatusMessage] = 'Agent is running'

,[AgentStatusData] = NULL

,[AgentStatusTimeStampUtc] = GETUTCDATE()

WHERE AgentStatus = 5

‐------‐------------------------

Thanks in advance.

aLTeReGo

That query will force the Agents out of 'Pending Reboot' status. It is used in rare circumstances when the Agent may be inaccurately reporting the machine has a pending reboot. If the machine is really pending a reboot this can be determined via the Registry. This is the same way the Agent determines the machine has a reboot pending.

mat12

Hi aLTeReGo

Thanks for your confirmation.

And yes, we confirm that the server has no pending reboot on the registry and still with status of pending reboot so i guess we can run the command on those affected servers before we upgrade.

Thanks a lot!