Open for Voting

Reinstall Agent Option in Manage Agents

Issue:  If a bad SAM agent get's pushed out it's a real hassle to uninstall/reinstall agents.

Solution: From Manage Agent's or from the Node Details | Manage Node there should be an option to re-install an agent.  The Manage Agents screen would be nice to mass agent re-installs whereas the Node Details | Manage Node on a single device.

Real-world implications: We recently pushed out a SAM agent Buddy Drop and then we had to back out of it.  This caused all sorts of issues and the only way we could remove the offending package was to uninstall/re-install the agent.  In another instance we enabled application mapping and later disabled it.  In order to get the plugin off the agents we had to uninstall/reinstall the agent.  Another example was we changed our global agent settings from allowing automatic agent updates to disallowing agent updates.  Again we had to uninstall/reinstall the agents to push out the changes.

  • Having the option to reinstall the agent from the GUI would be nice. Deleting the agent also deletes the node, so you'd need to add back any special monitoring that you're doing, as well as adding it back to maps, etc. Changing the polling method clears the history, so still not a great option. The only real option I've found is to go to the node, stop the services, manually uninstall the agent, delete out the old agent folder, then reinstall the agent. This actually maintains the node in Orion so you don't have to reconfigure the node in all of the modules, maps, etc.

  • Yes we've done that but it's not a smooth process and it takes a while, especially if you have a lot of nodes to do.  What I've done recently, and it much cleaner than your suggestion, is to change the management from agent based to WMI based and then changing it back to agent based.  This is actually much cleaner than your suggestion.

    However this too is timely when it comes to a large number of nodes.  My feature request is to have the ability to select a number or agent based nodes and to uninstall/reinstall the agent software. We have 1933 agent managed nodes.  Going one by one to find the bad agents and re-installing the software is time consuming. Whereas having the ability to select multiple agents, ill regardless of the OS or agent type and issuing a one-shot-one-kill approach would be a god send.

    I'm guessing not a lot of people have had a need to do this and if so it's on a as needed case, but we've had the need to do this multiple times.  I'm also guessing someone out there has written a SWQL command that does this, but we don't allow everyone in our environment that level of access.  So this ability in the console would help these people too. 

  • Deleting the agent itself from the Orion web console uninstalls the agent from the remotely host (provided the agent is connected to the Orion server). Once uninstalled you can then re-deploy, also from the Orion Web console.