Checking the status of agents

The ESM 9.0 manager refers to a cache to check the status of the agents each time you perform a policy run on the agents. The cache is created for those agents whose domain has the Perform Agent Status Check enabled.

The cache is populated when the manager is not able to contact the agent during a policy run. The creation of this cache is an incremental process and is created for every agent on which the manager tries to run a policy.

The ESM manager does not contact the agent in the cache for a specified period. This time period is a configurable value that is specified in the manager.conf file, which is located in the \esm\config folder. The manager.conf file contains a parameter named AGENT_CACHE_TIMEOUT_HOURS that you use to specify the timeout period.

The minimum and the default value for AGENT_CACHE_TIMEOUT_HOURS is 1 hour. The maximum value that you can specify is 8760 hours (365 days).

Note:

The Perform Agent Status Check setting gets reset if you add an ESM agent with a version earlier than 9.0 to a standard domain. You must select the Perform Agent Status Check option again to re-configure agent status check on the selected standard domain.

The cache contains entries of the agents that the manager was unable to contact for any of the following reasons:

The agent computer was not running.
The agent was not able to acknowledge the manager's request for connection within a specified time.

You can enable the ESM 9.0 manager to check the agent's status each time you perform a policy run. You must have the following rights to enable agent status check on the ESM manager:

Modify Domain rights to enable or disable the Perform Agent Status Check option.
Modify All Domains rights to enable the Perform Agent Status Check option from the manager properties.

To check the agent's status at the domain level

Right-click a domain and click Perform agent status check from the menu that appears.

After you click Perform agent status check, the ESM manager checks the agent status each time you perform a policy run in this domain.

To disable the agent status check option, right-click the domain and click Perform agent status check again.

To check the agent's status at the manager level

Right-click a manager and click Properties from the menu that appears.
In the Options tab, in the Agent status check section, check Perform status check for all the domains.

After you check Perform agent status check for all the domains, the ESM manager checks the agent status for all the domains under the selected manager.

To disable the agent status check option on manager level

Right-click the ESM manager and click Properties from the menu that appears.
In the Options tab, uncheck Perform status check for all domains.

To purge the agent status cache

Right-click a manager and click Properties from the menu that appears.
In the Options tab, in the Agent status check section, click Reset.

To check the agent's status at the command line

Use the following command-line options to check the status of an agent:

set dmnflag

Enable or disable the domain flag for a domain

See Checking the status of agents.

show dmnflag

Check the status of the domain flag for a domain

remove agtcache

Remove the cache from the manager that is currently connected