Agents Installed but Not Being Used

Ahh agents, the joy of every monitoring engineer who has to monitor 1) a secure node, 2) a remote node over an unreliable link or 3) something where you have to get data to your Orion platform across the interwebs. Eager server admins will install agents as you sing the praises of single port connections to Windows boxes (take that RPC!) and monitoring goodness all around but how do you know when said admins have installed the agent?

If it is a brand new node then the node will auto-register and you can see the new node in the Manage Agents screen or, if you are a real smarty pants you've set up an alert to notify you when an agent node is registered. (Oh, you haven't done that yet? Try replicating the alert in this screen shot -- you're welcome )

Even after setting up this alert (see, you are a smarty pants after all!) you are still seeing some nodes in the Manage Agents screen (/Orion/AgentManagement/Admin/ManageAgents.aspx) with the dreaded spying agent man!

This means that the agent is installed on the node but the polling method is not set to agent. Now that you know they are out there then you are going to want to find and destroy them, right!?! (And by destroy, I mean either modify the node to change to agent polled, remembering that you will lose historical data in the changeover, or uninstalling the agent from said node.)

Try this SQL query in a report.

SELECT

nd.Caption

,nd.DNS

,nd.IP_Address

FROM [SolarWindsOrion].[dbo].[AgentManagement_Agents] ama

LEFT JOIN [SolarWindsOrion].[dbo].[NodesData] nd ON ama.NodeId = nd.NodeID

WHERE

nd.ObjectSubType != 'Agent'

And if you are a SWQL elitest (oops, did I say that?!? ) then you can use this query:

SELECT Hostname, DNSName, IP

FROM Orion.AgentManagement.Agent ama

WHERE

ama.node.ObjectSubType != 'Agent'

Happy agent hunting!

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All comments

tallyrich

Nice article and helpful. I've found that if I install an agent when I first add a server to SolarWinds that often the agent doesn't get all it's "stuff." I need to go into list resources and then the agent fully installs. Using a tool like this could prove helpful so that I don't miss anything installing.

goodzhere

I'll also add that in many cases, you could have issues after performing an upgrade. The agents will need to be updated. In some cases, after the update, the node will need to be rebooted to bring the agent online. If you can't reboot due to production, you will have a period where you cannot collect via agent. If you switch to WMI during the time that you can't poll via Agent, you may lose historical data. Just things to think about when utilizing agents.

jbiggley

Define 'stuff'? An agent polled node is the same as an SNMP or WMI polled node when it is first added. You will still need to go in and List Resources to add the elements to be monitored on those nodes in addition to doing any tagging of custom properties, etc. I know that it is possible to do List Resources via the API (although I hear there may be some challenges with agent polled nodes) however my API skills are weak so I'll let someone like mrxinugive some guidance there.

jbiggley

Good call on agents. There is a reason that we went away from them a few years ago. We use them in some very specific use cases included the need for secure communications or in high-latency scenarios where the link is tenuous. That reboot is a problem if the agent needs to come back online and we've seen that a few times but usually only when there are pending reboots because of patches, etc. on the target node.

Like all good things, moderation is advised.

tallyrich

What I happens is that the agent says it installs and shows as installed when I look at agents. However, when I go to list resources it will bring up the dialogue that says that the agent isn't installed and will need to be installed. I let it install from there and it goes back to the information page on the server. When I again open list resources it goes right to the resources.