Agents - Data

Use the Administrative Services > Agents > Data node to view and control the various Data Manager agents that are running on the monitored machines in your environment. When you expand the Data node, one sub node appears for each agent machine that is monitored by the Aperi Storage Manager server into which you are currently logged.

Viewing information about an agent

To view detailed information about a Data Manager agent, expand the Data node in the navigation tree and left-click on an agent. Information about that agent appears in the content pane and is divided into three tabs:

• General
• Detail
• Jobs

Performing actions against agents

You can perform a number of administrative actions against the agents listed under the node. Different actions are available for each agent depending on its status. To perform actions against an agent:

1. Expand the Data node and right-click on an agent.
2. Select one of the following actions from the pop-up menu to perform against the agent:
• View Log - View the log file for the agent. The log file contains informational, warning, and error messages for the previous sessions of the agent. Use the content of the log file to troubleshoot any errors that might occur during agent startup, processing, or shutdown.

  By default, information from the last 5 sessions of the agent appears in the log window. A session starts when the agent is started and ends when the agents goes down. You can increase or decrease how many sessions for the agent are kept in the history by changing the value for the logFilesKept parameter in the agent.config file.

  Log files for an agent and the agent.config file are located in the agent install directory.

• Configure Tracing - Configure tracing on an agent. The Agent Tracing Configuration window is displayed.
• Read Config - Have an agent read the agent.config file. The agent.config file contains parameters that you can change to customize the behavior of an agent.
  Select this option for an agent if you have made changes to the agent.config file and you want that agent to use those changes.
• Check - Check to: 1) Determine if an agent is up or down, and 2) determine if the version of the agent is out of date. If the agent needs to be upgraded, clicking this option will automatically install the required upgrades.

  Note: A Check will also enable an agent that is currently disabled.

• Shutdown - Shut down this agent. You can choose to shutdown in the following ways:
  • Normal - Shut down the agent software and let all running processes complete. The agent will continue to accept new jobs that are submitted and won't shut down until 1) all running processes are complete and 2) there are no new jobs submitted.
  • Immediate - Shut down the agent software when the currently running processes complete. No new jobs will be accepted by the agent and shutdown will occur immediately after the last job completes.
  • Abort - Shut down the agent software and stop whatever processes are currently running.
• Disable - Select this option to designate that an agent is "unavailable" and to indicate that the server should not contact the agent for any job processing. Use this option depending on the situation within your environment. For example, you might want to disable an agent when:
  • the agent machine is undergoing maintenance and will be unavailable. This prevents the server from flagging the agent as "down" if it cannot reach the agent a certain amount of times as defined by the agentErrorLimit parameter in the server.config file.
  • the agent machine is busy with resource-intensive processing and you want do not want to add any Data Manager jobs to that processing load.

  While disabled, the agent will appear with a red outlined circle with a line through it in the user interface and the server will not attempt to contact the agent.

• Enable - Select this option to re-enable an agent that is currently disabled. Once enabled, the server will resume communication with the agent.
  Note: If the server cannot contact an agent equal to the number defined for the agentErrorLimit parameter in the server.config (the default is 3), the server will automatically flag the agent as "down". Select the this option to reestablish communication between the agent and server and reset the agentErrorLimit parameter to 0.

  Note: A Check action will also enable an agent that is currently disabled.

• Delete - Erase the agent from the database repository.